Wikidata:Project chat/Archive/2015/05

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wd-sorted-statements.js

Thanks a lot to User:Hardwigg for posting

if ( mw.config.get('wgNamespaceNumber') === 0 ) { // On an entity page
	$('.wikibase-statementgrouplistview > .wikibase-listview')
		.prepend($('#P31, #P279'));
}

I extended this to User:FreightXPress/wd-sorted-statements.js.

Nikki - you said you are interested in consistent ordering too. I would be happy to hear, whether you think this is an improvement. FreightXPress (talk) 17:08, 26 April 2015 (UTC)

To get sorted statements, you might be interested in this user script: User:Soulkeeper/statementSort.js --Pasleim (talk) 19:37, 26 April 2015 (UTC)
@Pasleim: thanks a lot. The function toBottom is what I needed. FreightXPress (talk) 21:01, 26 April 2015 (UTC)

@Pasleim, Hardwigg, Soulkeeper, Nikki: Pasleim uses colors for the different data-types in the page Wikidata:Database reports/List of properties/all. I would like to have these colors on item pages too. Is that possible with JS or CSS? FreightXPress (talk) 21:08, 26 April 2015 (UTC)

@FreightXPress: Nice! I think a combination of the two would work best. First add a class to each datatype. The easiest way would probably be like this:
show code
wd_statement_prepend_by_property_list(datatype_wikibase_item, 'datatype-wikibase-item');
wd_statement_prepend_by_property_list(datatype_wikibase_property, 'datatype-wikibase-property');
wd_statement_prepend_by_property_list(datatype_commonsmedia, 'datatype-commonsmedia');
wd_statement_prepend_by_property_list(datatype_url, 'datatype-url');
wd_statement_prepend_by_property_list(datatype_time, 'datatype-time');
wd_statement_prepend_by_property_list(datatype_quantity, 'datatype-quantity');
wd_statement_prepend_by_property_list(datatype_globe_coordinate, 'datatype-globe-coordinate');
wd_statement_prepend_by_property_list(datatype_monolingualtext, 'datatype-monolingualtext');
wd_statement_prepend_by_property_list(p_top, 'p-top');

function wd_statement_prepend_by_property_list(prop_array, datatype_class){
        var prop_string =prop_array.join(',#P');
        prop_string = '#P' + prop_string;
        //alert(prop_string);
        $('.wikibase-statementgrouplistview > .wikibase-listview').prepend($(prop_string).addClass(datatype_class));
}
And then style each different type with CSS. Here's a material design styling, just for fun. To use it, add to your your common.js:
mw.loader.load( '//www.wikidata.org/w/index.php?title=User:Hardwigg/statementgroup-datatypes.js&action=raw&ctype=text/javascript', 'text/javascript' );
mw.loader.load( '//www.wikidata.org/w/index.php?title=User:Hardwigg/wd-material-typed.css&action=raw&ctype=text/css', 'text/css' );
-Hardwigg (talk) 03:13, 28 April 2015 (UTC)
@Hardwigg: I will try your design later. Maybe you like to test mine: https://www.wikidata.org/w/index.php?title=User:FreightXPress/common.css&oldid=213239774 . I used "_" instead of "-", that could potentially allow the code to be even smaller, if one could provide "'datatype_monolingualtext'" as a string and then within the function it is converted to a variable name. Also, I failed to have all the data in one (2-dimensional) array with named fields, or a json object, but that should be possible. Then via providing a string to the function one could access the array in the array. For the CSS: I used only border coloring. I had background, but it was too much deviation from the normal interface. But I didn't tried your's yet! Thanks a lot! FreightXPress (talk) 12:05, 28 April 2015 (UTC)
@Hardwigg: I adjusted the class names in my JS to match yours. Then I tried your CSS - looks good. I then also changed my colors to be closer to yours, but kept 3-digit notation with multiple of 3 (0, 3, 6, 9, c ,f). FreightXPress (talk) 13:59, 29 April 2015 (UTC)
@FreightXPress: Hyphenated CSS names are part of the MedaWiki Coding Conventions. (Not that my CSS is that good about following conventions ;)). I tried out your bordered-style, and it looks good; it's less jarring than the material one. -Hardwigg (talk) 04:34, 2 May 2015 (UTC)

I managed to store all datatype-property-relationships in one object and name the fields by the CSS names:

show code
function wikibase_statement_prepend_by_property_list(property_array,class_name){
	var property_string =property_array.join(',#P');
	property_string = '#P' + property_string;
	$('.wikibase-statementgrouplistview > .wikibase-listview').prepend($(property_string).addClass(class_name));
}
/**** properties in statements grouped by datatype, 
 * order of datatypes as in Special:ListDatatypes
 * datatype-string: don't mention all of them here, will be at bottom automatically, most of the items are external identifiers
 * mention those that are not identifiers
****/
var datatype_property = {
	"commonsmedia":[10,14,15,18,41,51,94,109,117,154,158,181,207,242,367,368,443,491,692,948,989,990,996,1442,1543,1621,1766,1801,1846],
	"globe-coordinate":[625,626,1259,1332,1333,1334,1335],
	"quantity":[1081,1082,1083,1086,1087,1088,1090,1092,1093,1096,1097,1098,1099,1100,1101,1102,1103,1104,1106,1107,1108,1109,1110,1111,1112,1113,1114,1117,1118,1119,1120,1121,1122,1123,1124,1125,1126,1127,1128,1129,1130,1131,1132,1139,1141,1148,1164,1174,1181,1193,1198,1215,1247,1279,1295,1301,1314,1339,1342,1345,1350,1351,1352,1355,1356,1357,1358,1359,1373,1390,1410,1418,1436,1446,1457,1458,1470,1538,1539,1540,1548,1561,1569,1570,1590,1603,1641,1658,1661,1674,1675,1676,1689,1697,1725,1752,1831,1833],
	"string":[373,935],
	"time":[569,570,571,574,575,576,577,578,580,582,585,606,619,620,621,622,729,730,746,813,1191,1249,1317,1319,1326,1619,1636,1734],
	"url":[854,855,856,857,953,963,968,973,1019,1065,1244,1324,1325,1348,1401,1421,1482,1581,1613,1628,1709,1713],
	"wikibase-item":[6,7,9,16,17,19,20,21,22,25,26,27,30,31,35,36,37,38,39,40,43,44,47,50,53,54,57,58,59,61,65,66,69,78,81,84,85,86,87,88,91,92,97,98,101,102,103,105,106,108,110,111,112,113,114,115,118,119,121,122,123,126,127,128,129,131,134,135,136,137,138,140,141,143,144,149,150,155,156,157,159,161,162,163,166,167,169,170,171,172,175,176,177,178,179,180,183,184,185,186,189,190,193,194,195,196,197,199,200,201,205,206,208,209,210,237,241,248,263,264,272,275,276,277,279,282,286,287,289,291,301,306,344,355,358,360,361,364,366,369,371,375,376,397,398,399,400,403,404,405,406,407,408,410,411,412,413,414,415,417,418,421,423,425,427,437,447,448,449,450,451,452,453,457,459,460,461,462,463,466,467,468,469,470,479,483,485,488,489,495,500,501,504,505,509,511,512,514,515,516,517,518,520,521,522,523,524,527,530,531,532,533,534,537,538,541,542,543,545,546,547,548,550,551,552,553,556,559,560,562,565,566,567,568,579,588,589,598,607,608,609,610,611,612,618,624,629,631,634,636,641,642,647,654,655,658,659,660,664,669,674,676,678,680,681,682,684,688,689,690,693,694,697,702,703,706,707,708,710,720,725,726,734,735,736,737,738,739,740,741,744,747,748,749,750,751,756,765,767,768,769,770,780,783,784,785,786,787,788,789,790,793,794,795,796,797,800,802,803,805,807,811,812,814,816,817,822,823,825,826,828,831,832,833,834,837,840,841,852,853,859,868,870,872,873,878,880,881,885,887,908,910,912,913,914,915,916,921,922,923,924,925,926,927,928,929,930,931,937,941,942,943,944,945,967,970,971,972,974,991,1000,1001,1002,1011,1012,1013,1016,1018,1026,1027,1028,1029,1032,1033,1034,1035,1037,1038,1039,1040,1041,1046,1049,1050,1056,1057,1060,1064,1066,1068,1071,1072,1073,1074,1075,1078,1079,1080,1135,1136,1137,1142,1145,1151,1152,1158,1165,1170,1171,1192,1194,1196,1199,1200,1201,1202,1204,1210,1211,1221,1227,1264,1268,1269,1283,1290,1299,1302,1303,1304,1308,1310,1312,1313,1318,1321,1322,1327,1336,1340,1343,1344,1346,1347,1349,1354,1363,1365,1366,1372,1376,1382,1383,1387,1389,1393,1398,1399,1403,1406,1408,1411,1412,1414,1416,1419,1420,1423,1424,1425,1427,1429,1431,1432,1433,1434,1435,1437,1441,1443,1444,1445,1454,1455,1456,1462,1464,1465,1478,1479,1480,1531,1532,1533,1534,1535,1536,1537,1542,1546,1547,1552,1557,1558,1560,1568,1571,1574,1576,1582,1589,1591,1592,1593,1594,1595,1596,1597,1598,1604,1605,1606,1611,1620,1622,1625,1629,1637,1639,1640,1642,1643,1652,1654,1656,1657,1660,1672,1677,1678,1686,1703,1704,1706,1716,1731,1740,1750,1753,1754,1773,1774,1775,1776,1777,1778,1779,1780,1789,1791,1792,1809,1811,1817,1830,1840,1851,1853,1855,1859],
	"wikibase-property":[1646,1647,1659,1687,1696],
	"monolingualtext":[1448,1449,1450,1451,1476,1477,1549,1559,1635,1638,1680,1683,1684,1705,1813,1843]
}

/* desired order of display */
var wikibase_datatype_property_order = ['monolingualtext','globe-coordinate','time','quantity','url','commonsmedia','wikibase-property','wikibase-item','string'];

wikibase_datatype_property_order.reverse();
for (var i in wikibase_datatype_property_order) {
	datatype_name = wikibase_datatype_property_order[i];
	wikibase_statement_prepend_by_property_list(datatype_property[datatype_name],'datatype-'+datatype_name);
}

/**** properties in statements that provide human readable identification of the item ****/
/* instance of, subclass of, part of, has part */ 
var p_top = [31,279,361,527];

wikibase_statement_prepend_by_property_list(p_top,"x_p_top");

FreightXPress (talk) 19:40, 29 April 2015 (UTC)

Datatype comparison table

Name from Special:ListDatatypes Commons media Globe coordinate Quantity String Time URL Item Property Monolingual text
Qunatity from Wikidata:Database reports/List of properties/all 31 8 102 ~700 29 23 590 6 17
Name from Wikidata:Database reports/List of properties/all commonsMedia globe-coordinate quantity string time url wikibase-item wikibase-property monolingualtext
Name in CSS classes, lowercase of the DB report names commonsmedia globe-coordinate quantity string time url wikibase-item wikibase-property monolingualtext
Color from Wikidata:Database reports/List of properties/all antiquewhite lavender oldlace lavenderblush lightyellow honeydraw wikibase-item / no specific color wikibase-property / no specific color mintcream
Color from User:FreightXPress/commons.css 3 digit web-safe color (Q19842015) #f90 #3c9 #3cf #fc0 #0cc #009 #3c3 #633 #ff0
Color 3 digit / bright #fda #afd #aef #feb #9ff #ccf #cfc #dcc #ffc
Color from User:Hardwigg/wd-material-typed.css 1 #FF9800 #4CAF50 #FFC107 string / no coloring #FFEB3B #03A9F4 #3F51B5 string / no coloring #00BCD4
Color from User:Hardwigg/wd-material-typed.css 2 #FFE0B2 #C8E6C9 #FFECB3 string / no coloring #FFF9C4 #B3E5FC #C5CAE9 string / no coloring #B2EBF2

@Hardwigg, Pasleim: I made a comparison table. I adjusted my border-colors to better match the dark colors used by Hardwigg, but rounded them, so that in 3-digit notation only multiple of 3 would be used (0, 3, 6, 9, c, f). I used a value close to link-blue for URL. Item statements and string statements will occur very often, so something aggressive is ruled out, I chose green for item. Hardwigg - where do your dark values come from? E.g. FF9800 is very close to my f90, but maybe there is a reason to have FF9800? In your color sets two datatypes have no coloring. FreightXPress (talk) 13:50, 29 April 2015 (UTC)

@FreightXPress: My palette's taken from Google's Material Design specification (using materialpalette.com). I have no special attachment to the specific colors :) I mostly tried to use colors of similar hue to those of Wikidata:Database reports/List of properties/all. The uncolored datatypes are just the result of negligence on my part. When I have some time, I'll work on the material design, place some more thought into the color choices, and fill in the missing types. -Hardwigg (talk) 04:34, 2 May 2015 (UTC)

@Pasleim: You use Honeydraw, do you mean Honeydew? FreightXPress (talk) 19:50, 29 April 2015 (UTC)

"list of" episode

The class of all episode of Doctor Who (Q34316)      just has been linked to the item about the serie. So we now got an item that is both

and a list of episode. Is this really correct ? I don't know, do we have guidelines somewhere ? at some point we must have a rule for this otherwise this is a mess.

About episode (Q1983062)      : we can subclass this item with tv series and radiophonic episode. I think I did in the past, does anyone knows why they have been merged ?)

TomT0m (talk) 14:56, 27 April 2015 (UTC)

If you ask me it is wrong. There may be a category or a list article where the "list of" makes sense. Having a subclass of "Dr Who episode" is plain silly. Thanks, GerardM (talk) 06:45, 28 April 2015 (UTC)
you mean having a subclass of episode ? It's not silly, it's pretty convenient to be able to make specific subclasses (that's the whole point of subclassing). Imho the episode concept barely make sense if it is not subclassed. It's always an episode of some series. (and tv series episode is even more senseful, not having it would make a query in the set of all series who are television series more complicated). TomT0m (talk) 07:06, 28 April 2015 (UTC)
I agree that "Doctor Who episode" should not be a subclass of "episodes"; it should only be a list of episode (and probably renamed to something like "Doctor Who episode list"). Having "Doctor Who episode" implies "episode" should be subclassed into "Big Bang Theory episode", "Friends episode", "Modern Family episode", etc, which is silly. However I support subclassing "episode" into television/radio/etc. episode. -Hardwigg (talk) 03:28, 29 April 2015 (UTC)
@Hardwigg: First, no, it does not imply that. If you really want to list every episode instances, you can use Wikidata Query, which will work whether or not it is subclassed, but there is no problem with this. Considering a serie is by definition a list of episode, there is no need for a list of episode item, essentially. If we generate a query by episode in the future, this modelling is fine too: the article about the episode will list all the instances of some series' epidode class, ordered by their season/sequence number. Second, What's the problem with creating those items ? TomT0m (talk) 15:17, 29 April 2015 (UTC)
@TomT0m: I agree that subclassing with "Doctor Who episode" does not limit queries in any way. You can still search all episodes (CLAIM[instanceOf:TREE[episode][][subclassOf]]).
However not subclassing with "Doctor Who episode" also does not limit queries. You can still search for Doctor Who episodes (CLAIM[instanceOf:TREE[episode][][subclassOf]] AND CLAIM[series:Doctor Who]). I personally find this cleaner than CLAIM[instanceOf:Doctor Who episode], because it is more generic. It will work for any series; just replace the value of the series claim.
I also agree that having that "list of episode" item is not very useful, but we need a way to represent list pages in Wikipedia. (Actually, should list of Doctor Who episodes (2005–present) (Q387513) and list of Doctor Who episodes (1963–present) (Q19838686) be merged? Their corresponding Wikipedia pages both look to be lists of Doctor Who episodes).
I also agree that there is nothing technically incorrect with subclassing in this way (the universe of Doctor Who episodes is a subset of the "episode" universe). The reason I am against it is because I think it is too specific a subclass to be useful, and I don't see why it should be created. The relationship between a Doctor Who episode and the series "Doctor Who" is already well represented by the "series" property. I see subclassing "episode" into "Doctor Who episode", etc., the same as subclassing "novel" into "Harry Potter novel", "Sword of Truth novel", etc. Actually, you could probably replace every statement on an item with a subclass: "Hemingway novel", "1923 novel", "originally English language novel", "novel with Harry Potter character". I don't think "Doctor who episode" is any different from these. What does having a "Doctor Who episode" item add?
Also, you are correct that it does not imply that those items need to be created. It does support their creation, though, with which I have the above problem.
-Hardwigg (talk) 20:21, 1 May 2015 (UTC)
@Hardwigg: I do not agree. I think those item are useful, and if the model offers the flexibility to make this work, I see no reason why we should not do that.
details on how I see things:
  • There is an item for list of doctor who episode. In the original plan of Wikidata, this corresponds to a query. This query will very much look like CLAIM[] (plus an ordering for the sequence, maybe). Let's call this item Doctor Who episode.
  • This query defines a class by intensional definition (Q1026899)     .
  • We should (that's where the uncertainty lies) be able to assert the membership of an item to a class, so potentially a query, if we want. This would mean this item should be in the query result
    ⟨ the episode ⟩ instance of (P31)   ⟨ Doctor Who episode ⟩
    should be something a user should be able to state (one edit at a time) :) So if the query does not returns the item, the item should be in a constraint report, and maybe someone would know the user did not put the series: Doctor Who claim. A semantic reasoner would not even need this, he would just deduce the claim himself.
Everything says that this makes sense and that it is possible. So this will be done by users. If we have the flexibility to do this, and this is consistent, I say we do this. If there is no real issue, no necessity to make some.
And last this is a flexibility I think we will need in a lot of cases when we do not really have enough information to build a meaningful query, and in which classes will exists and will be reals, but the properties we have won't be able to build a precise enough query. I think this ability to mix extensional definitions (when we explicitely says these items are members of this class and intensional one (a query will compute the instances) is a powerful thing that we should keep in mind.
So my position: if we can, this will be done, and there is no reason to fight this. This is (if nothing more) a conflict avoidance strategy :) TomT0m (talk) 08:23, 2 May 2015 (UTC)
@Hardwigg: One more thing, that the subway id topic below made me think of : there may be cases where these by episode items could even serve in constraint or as domain for some properties, this is similar to the Tokyo subway station example where there could be properties specific to Tokyo subway for example. TomT0m (talk) 14:44, 2 May 2015 (UTC)
I think all 'list of' items should be 'subclass of'.
'List of' itself doesn't mean much ontologically so by themselves these 'list of' items are not much use. In practice these describe a class of items and that is very useful in an ontology. For instance we have lots of 'list of mayors of Foo' articles. Rename these to 'mayor of foo' (alias 'list of mayors of Foo') and it is useful as a target for 'position held' statements. Or do you want to create a million 'mayor of Foo' items with no sitelinks? Even if there are no 'instance of' statements pointing at an item that isn't a reason to say we must not call it a class. If it's a class then give it a 'subclass of' statement - it may be the only statement you can make about that item. Filceolaire (talk) 20:56, 2 May 2015 (UTC)

Add a link to the creation discussion to property talk pages

Most property talk pages have very little information on how the property is to be used. They have the constraints but these in some cases contradict what was agreed in the discussion when the property was created.

Can we add a link to the archived property creation discussion? Let's put this at the top of the page, above the constraints? These discussions usually include useful guidance on how the property is to be used which is not available elsewhere and which is not easy to find. Filceolaire (talk) 01:19, 2 May 2015 (UTC)

I agree that we probably can do much better (I did propositions some time ago but nobody understood /o\). But things also evolves for good reasons beetween the creation and the current usage on the property. So I do not agree to just put a link. We should (and either the wikidatian who proposed the property, the creator ...) care to put a good documentation and a little text explanation on how to use the property on the property page. And when things evolves and new usecase are found, keep this up to date
If that's too big of a burden, we should index the usecases themselves, as often properties are used together, or said differently, for a given usecase, there is a set of properties involved. We should document the usecases, and for each property, give links in the property documenation on this pages.
That's why I proposed to also document classes, as a class is often associated to a set of related properties (for example, an event and its subclasses all have a date or an interval of date, usually a topic ..., that's also true for the subclasses). TomT0m (talk) 07:59, 2 May 2015 (UTC)
I didn't say mine is a complete solution but it seemed like an easy first step everyone could understand. In many cases use cases are documented in wikidata projects and I don't think that should be duplicated - we should have links to those as well. Filceolaire (talk) 20:16, 2 May 2015 (UTC)

Don't change old values of publication?

The instruction for publication date (P577) currently says "don't replace old values", but it doesn't say why. If, for example, an art-house film was released during a film festival, what would be wrong about increasing the precision of P577 from "2014" to "2014-09-03"? Is there any reason for retaining the less precise value (unlike in the publication values for Lucy (Q15624215))? Gabbe (talk) 08:47, 2 May 2015 (UTC)

Ping @Tobias1984: you were the one who have added this instruction. Gabbe (talk) 09:20, 2 May 2015 (UTC)
@Gabbe: I added that message because people editing software items are always removing old releases and adding new ones without sources. Or they increase the minor version number, but keep the source that only is valid for the major release. --Tobias1984 (talk) 09:27, 2 May 2015 (UTC)
But for the specific example I mentioned (a film premiere) you don't see any problem? Gabbe (talk) 09:31, 2 May 2015 (UTC) Edit: By "see any problem" I mean, would you mind? Gabbe (talk) 09:35, 2 May 2015 (UTC)
For films, a year of publication can always be helpful, even if there are more precise value for whatever place of (initial or subsequent) publication. Most lists and categories are by year of publication. --- Jura 09:37, 2 May 2015 (UTC)
But isn't the year implicit from the more precise date? For example, what is wrong with this edit? Gabbe (talk) 09:42, 2 May 2015 (UTC)
Yes and no. In your edit, we don't know for sure if it's the initial date of publication ("release"). For other types of works, it might be more straightforward. --- Jura 09:54, 2 May 2015 (UTC)
@Gabbe: Your example seems perfectly fine. A more precise date is always good, and the year can be easily filtered from a date. --Tobias1984 (talk) 09:55, 2 May 2015 (UTC)
@Jura1: But if I do know for certain that it was its first release, then it would be okay? For items that are people, for example, we don't keep separate "year of birth" and "date of birth", even if categories are typically by "year of birth" (and the specific date is sometimes not known precisely). Gabbe (talk) 10:00, 2 May 2015 (UTC)
For DOB, a comparable issue could be when we can start entering time of birth. --- Jura 10:15, 2 May 2015 (UTC)
This needs to be rewritten. My suggested wording "(If rereleased then add the date of rerelease but keep the date of first release)". Filceolaire (talk) 20:26, 2 May 2015 (UTC)

Same label in many languages

An examination of the history of GrassBase (Q19816560), which I created recently with the English-language label "Grassbase", shows others adding the same label in French and German. Indeed, I would expect the label, which is a proper noun, to be the same in every language using the western alphabet.

Would it be possible to have an option when setting a label, to do so for every such language? Individual instances could always be changed later, if necessary.

Or perhaps someone might make a tool to do this? Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 09:39, 20 April 2015 (UTC)

Add importScript( 'User:Jitrixis/nameGuzzler.js' ); to your personal JavaScript and copy this page to your own namespace. That would do the job. A link would appear in the tools menu. Sjoerd de Bruin (talk) 09:54, 20 April 2015 (UTC)
Thank you. That looks useful I'm not sure what the "autoselct" option is supposed to do. Also, is there a method to select only languages which are RTL, and/ or use the western alphabet? Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 10:58, 20 April 2015 (UTC)
The autoselect fetches the list from your namespace. I think it contains all western languages. Sjoerd de Bruin (talk) 11:00, 20 April 2015 (UTC)
@Sjoerddebruin: It not working - not doing anything - for me :-( Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 21:28, 20 April 2015 (UTC)
@Sjoerddebruin: Are you able to advise, please? Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 16:26, 23 April 2015 (UTC)
@Pigsonthewing: can you be more specific, please? Sjoerd de Bruin (talk) 17:10, 23 April 2015 (UTC)
@Sjoerddebruin: I click on the "autoselect" link and - literally - nothing happens. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 22:40, 23 April 2015 (UTC)
@Pigsonthewing: you still need to save with the buttons on the bottom. Sjoerd de Bruin (talk) 15:24, 27 April 2015 (UTC)
@Sjoerddebruin: Thank you., but I don't get that far When I click the "autoselect" link, nothing gets selected. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 17:00, 27 April 2015 (UTC)
@Pigsonthewing: that's weird. You don't seem to have conflicting scripts, don't know what gadgets you use. Or are you double clicking on it? Sjoerd de Bruin (talk) 18:03, 27 April 2015 (UTC)

──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────── @Sjoerddebruin: Single-clicking (double-clicking doesn't work, either). Oddly, after I click that link, the other link also becomes unresponsive. My enabled gadgets are: Merge; slurpInterwiki; AutoEdit; FindRedirectsForAliases; labelLister; Search; RequestDeletion; CommonsMEdia; Decritions; Reasonator; DraggableSitelinks; Site ID to interwiki; Protection indicators; PopupsFix; Navigation popups; Redirect image links to Commons for files that are hosted there; NewSection. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 19:09, 27 April 2015 (UTC)

Seems like a Firefox issue, I assume that you use that browser because a other user is also having the problem. I've asked Lydia if she can ask a developer to look at it. Sjoerd de Bruin (talk) 12:38, 3 May 2015 (UTC)
I already have this, will that do? --Magnus Manske (talk) 10:03, 20 April 2015 (UTC)
@Magnus Manske: Thank you. Is there any documentation? Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 10:58, 20 April 2015 (UTC)
@Magnus Manske: that seems very interesting, but how do you use it to edit, please ? --Hsarrazin (talk) 19:46, 24 April 2015 (UTC)

If it's written with a different alphabet is it a different language?

There are a number of languages which can be written in multiple alphabets. When we use the "monolingual text" datatype we are asked to indicate which language the text is in but it should also be possible to indicate which alphabet is used. Can this be done with monolingual text? Filceolaire (talk) 16:15, 30 April 2015 (UTC)

Script (per ISO), via "ISO 15924 alpha-4 or numeric code" (Property:P506) and/or an orthography? FreightXPress (talk) 16:32, 30 April 2015 (UTC)
This should be done with IETF language tag (Q1059900). I tried "en-latn" with Sandbox-Monolingual text (P1450) in Wikidata Sandbox (Q4115189), but my edit was blocked. IETF language code seem to be forbidden in "monolingual text". Ask developpers. Visite fortuitement prolongée (talk) 19:36, 30 April 2015 (UTC)
The answer is no. When something is written in a different script, it is still in the same language. Serbian may be sr-Latn or sr-Cyrl. Wikipedia uses technology to convert on the fly from one script to another. As far as I know we do not use that technolcogy for Wikidata. That is an issue and it is not solved by pretending that it is a different language. On a practical level, would we link sr.wp to the Cyrillic or to the Latin version... Same is true for Chinese. Consequently, it needs some REAL attention to do justice to this issue. It is not as simple as using monolingual type. Thanks, GerardM (talk) 05:50, 2 May 2015 (UTC)
Phabricator
So GerardM if a town in Serbia has an 'official name' with an official spelling in Cyrillic and an official spelling in Latin and we want to record both then the easiest way to do this (it seems to me) would be if 'monolingual text' could be tagged as 'sr-Latn' or as 'sr-Cyrl' as well as 'sr'. Does that seem like a sensible workaround to you? Filceolaire (talk) 20:34, 2 May 2015 (UTC)
Yes it does. GerardM (talk) 14:44, 3 May 2015 (UTC)

Murderers and their victims

Hi all, I could link the victim Cato Mirande (Q19685470) to her murderer, but how do I link the murderer Johan Barger (Q742496) back to the victim? thx Jane023 (talk) 07:39, 3 May 2015 (UTC)

You may propose inverse of the property. By the way, I think the property should be as a single claim, not as a qualifier as we want to have an inverse for it. Matěj Suchánek (talk) 07:47, 3 May 2015 (UTC)
OK I will do that (I couldn't find one either). Jane023 (talk) 08:16, 3 May 2015 (UTC)
Didn't we discuss once that having reverse properties is not such a good thing and should reather be solved using queries? -- Bene* talk 09:07, 3 May 2015 (UTC)
I didn't. Whose to say which direction is the "correct linking direction"? I am not sure what you mean. I of course would also like to see (for important properties) both the owned and owned-by fields on the respective pages of owners and their (former) properties. Are you saying this is not desirable behavior for the property concept? Jane023 (talk) 11:21, 3 May 2015 (UTC)

I mean objects such as buildings, paintings, or sculptures when I say properties plural and I do mean the Wikidata concept when I say property singular. Sorry for any confusion. Jane023 (talk) 11:32, 3 May 2015 (UTC)

Property proposal is here: Wikidata:Property_proposal/Person#Murdered Jane023 (talk) 06:41, 4 May 2015 (UTC)
A better solution might be to have the software automatically add the reverse property to the corresponding item. MSGJ (talk) 12:37, 5 May 2015 (UTC)

Policy about draft

Hi, Succu took on himself to move Help:Classification to User:TomT0m\Classification. This is a draft there is a discussion Wikidata:Requests_for_comment/Adopt_Help:Classification_as_an_official_help_page opened to adopt it as a real policy. I note that most opposition are not on the ideas behind the help page, but only about the form who needs more work ... I want community's opinion about this move, and if needed that we wlarify the policy about dratfs and proposal. TomT0m (talk) 10:27, 3 May 2015 (UTC)

And now Visite fortuitement prolongée just redirects the link to Help:Basic Membership Properties. Do you really want to annoy me ? There is a discussion going on and this breaks all the links ! TomT0m (talk) 14:17, 5 May 2015 (UTC)

Wikidata Visualization Challenge

I think this might be interesting to some here; a competition to visualize Wikidata has started. Jan Ainali (WMSE) (talk) 09:35, 4 May 2015 (UTC)

How to merge two items?

Please merge Q19848684 and Q7422719. I do not know how to do that. When attempting to connect the Commons category to the existing Wikipedia article, I was just offered the option to create a new item, but not to connect to the existing item. I find this confusing and I do not know how to fix this. --Aodh (talk) 16:03, 2 May 2015 (UTC)

Those should not be merged. Categories and articles are two separate things. Sjoerd de Bruin (talk) 16:09, 2 May 2015 (UTC)
This is not about categories and articles but about two items, both about Sarah Purser. Do you want to maintain two items about the same person? --Aodh (talk) 16:24, 2 May 2015 (UTC)
An item having only one link to Commons link is not notable. It isn't clear whether Commons categories may be connected to items. If I deleted the second item for not being notable, you would be able to add the link to the second item. However, I don't claim it would be okay. Matěj Suchánek (talk) 16:47, 2 May 2015 (UTC)
If Q19848684 could be deleted, it would be appreciated as it was created by accident. Thanks, Aodh (talk) 17:13, 2 May 2015 (UTC)
You needed to just add the Commons category (P373) to her item, which I just did. You created an item for a Wikipedia category, which could easily exist if you created two separate articles for stained glass windows or other artworks she created. The you link that category to the item you created. It looks like she made some notable works, so that could easily be a possibility. I would leave it for now. Jane023 (talk) 07:46, 3 May 2015 (UTC)
We are here still left with two items, one accidently created. Commons category (P373) does not help to link the Commons category to the corresponding Wikipedia articles which is the desired functionality at Commons. I could get the desired list of interwiki links to Wikipedia articles at Commons if I would be able to enlist the Commons category among the "other sites" to Q7422719. Unfortunately, this is not possible for me as the accidently created Q19848684 has already this link which I cannot remove. Please note that many of the categories at Commons are considered to be in par with articles as there are no articles at Commons (galleries do not count as such). See this discussion for details. --Aodh (talk) 10:12, 3 May 2015 (UTC)
Oh yes I see the problem now. Sorry, but we are no where near ready for that functionality. Right now the "Category:<cat name>" items on Wikidata are all for Wikipedia categories, not Wikimedia Commons categories. It is best to explore well fleshed out subjects to orient yourself on this material. I suggest taking a look at the Category structures for Vincent Vermeer for example. I still don't see an immediate reason to delete the item you accidentally created by the way. It will probably get used in the near future. Jane023 (talk) 11:28, 3 May 2015 (UTC)

Oops - I meant van Gogh or Vermeer - take your pick. Jane023 (talk) 11:29, 3 May 2015 (UTC)

Johannes Vermeer category have issue too. commons:Category:Johannes Vermeer does not have link to ruwiki at all. User needs at least two clicks to navigate to ru:Вермеер, Ян. And user must know where to click. — Ivan A. Krestinin (talk) 11:58, 3 May 2015 (UTC)
I don't see the issue. In the Russian Wikipedia they have chosen not to have a category for Jan Vermeer and only have a category for "Paintings by Jan Vermeer". Clearly they have more pages about Jan Vermeer than just the pages about his paintings (such as this one, so I don't think this is an issue, but a misunderstanding. Jane023 (talk) 12:59, 3 May 2015 (UTC)
Commons and Wikipedia have different structure. Primary items for our readers are files and categories on Commons (galleries are not because its count is low and many of its are outdated and useless). Primary items are articles in Wikipedia, the most readers know nothing about categories in Wikipedia. Link from Commons category to Wikipedia category is useless for readers because it follows from primary namespace to technical useless for reader category page. Also Johannes Vermeer is bad sample because it is untypical. The most entities does not have category in Wikipedia and does not have gallery in Commons, like Q7422719. — Ivan A. Krestinin (talk) 13:31, 3 May 2015 (UTC)
Yes I totally agree with you, and as someone who does a lot of categorizing on Commons I would even go a step further and say that casual readers know nothing about Commons categories either (alas!). See my previous comment about how this functionality is just not useful (yet). My point was about the intention of the linked categories as they now currently exist (such as for Vermeer). We can whine and moan about it, but it is what it is. Jane023 (talk) 16:05, 3 May 2015 (UTC)
@Jane023, Ivan A. Krestinin, Aodh: Can I recommend the script c:User:TheDJ/wdcat.js ?
If you add the line
importScript('User:TheDJ/wdcat.js');
to your common.js file on Commons (as in eg c:User:Jheald/common.js), then whenever you go to a Commons category, it will show you a link on the category page that goes to Reasonator, if there is a corresponding article-like Wikidata item with a P373. (And of course Reasonator then has a link to the articles on all the individual Wikipedias). It's a little slow, but I've found it really useful; I think you would find it worth giving a try. Jheald (talk) 17:43, 5 May 2015 (UTC)
Thank you for the script, but link to Wikipedia is needed, not to Resonator. And it is needed not for me. I know current project structure and can find required information. Link is needed for our readers, who know very little about our projects structures. Maybe you can adapt your script for this goal. We need script for replacing Wikipedia categories links to Wikipedia articles links. — Ivan A. Krestinin (talk) 19:42, 5 May 2015 (UTC)
 

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Posted by the MediaWiki message delivery 03:45, 4 May 2015 (UTC) • TranslateGet help

"specifies" relationship

Here's an interesting one that I'm not sure is captured as a property:

I'd like to be able to make the statement MIL-STD-1815 specifies Ada (Q154755) (or the inverse?). Is there such a relationship available? --Izno (talk) 15:06, 5 May 2015 (UTC)

@Izno: I don't think so, it seems like a good case for a property. main subject (P921)   fit for the other side of the relationship thought. TomT0m (talk) 15:09, 5 May 2015 (UTC)
How would you use main subject? --Izno (talk) 15:11, 5 May 2015 (UTC)
Also, I don't think "main subject" carries the intent that "specifies" does, though it is a near fit. We can say that MIL-STD-185 main subject Ada (Q154755) and it be a true statement, but it's not the entire intent of "specifies" ("specifies" carrying also the relation that the object item is "constrained by" the subject item ("the document")). --Izno (talk) 15:16, 5 May 2015 (UTC)
The main subject of the specification of a language is of course the language itself :) That is if you see the specification as a document. It may be different if you view the specification as a set of rule, but ... it may work as well :) Maybe we can generalize this to constructive and non constructive definition and to mathematical proofs of algorithms with a couple of fullfils/compute and defines/specifies properties though.
the main subject of the constraints is the languages, or more precisely wht it computes. Said differently, it's the semantics of the language. The semantic is a part of a language, so the language is a subject of the constraints :) TomT0m (talk) 15:18, 5 May 2015 (UTC)
I always wondered how far foundational text (P457) could extend... -- Gymel (talk) 15:56, 5 May 2015 (UTC)
I think statement is subject of (P805) can do the inverse job. "ADA" is the "subject of:MIL-STD-185". Filceolaire (talk) 23:54, 5 May 2015 (UTC)

Usage tracking issue (with saving pages)

There was an issue after deploy today with saving (wikitext) pages that are connected to some item. The problem was related to usage tracking phab:T98186 and should be fixed now. If there are any other problems please poke us. Aude (talk) 19:47, 5 May 2015 (UTC)

btw, new things in the deployment include a new special page for listing properties, Special:ListProperties, and some other bug fixes. mw:Wikidata_deployment#wmf.2F1.26wmf4 Aude (talk) 19:52, 5 May 2015 (UTC)

Edit actions performance

Hello, today large performance degradation appears for edit actions. For example this change takes 4.5 sec. Is it my local issue or global? Profiler says that POST request https://www.wikidata.org/w/api.php?action=wbsetclaim&... waits for server response during 4358 ms for the action. Were any known changes made this night? — Ivan A. Krestinin (talk) 09:57, 3 May 2015 (UTC)

I've experienced similar delays as well. Gabbe (talk) 10:07, 3 May 2015 (UTC)
Yes, same problem here and also on it.wikipedia. --ValterVB (talk) 10:38, 3 May 2015 (UTC)
Filed a bug and it was fixed. On wikitech:Incident documentation/20150503-JobQueueRedis you can read the incident report (people are still working on that). Multichill (talk) 17:06, 3 May 2015 (UTC)
This was fixed pretty quickly btw. Please let me know if it happens again. --Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) (talk) 12:51, 6 May 2015 (UTC)

Qualifiers for film releases

I've been thinking about adding more specific release dates for films, and in cases where they were released during a specific film festival, to mention that somehow.

At the moment, this seems to be a mess. My thought was to do as in Child of God (Q14366059), add the property publication date (P577) together with the qualifier significant event (P793) for the festival. For subsequent releases in various countries, the qualifier place of publication (P291) seems appropriate. Others have gone down different routes. Stray Dogs (Q12144835), for example, has the qualifier place of publication (P291) for the film festival. The Zero Theorem (Q863811) has location (P276) for the film festival and applies to part (P518) for the country released in.

A WikiProject might seem like the best place to find a consensus on how to do this right, but the relevant ones seem rather stale for now. Gabbe (talk) 06:17, 6 May 2015 (UTC)

It is hard to declare Wikidata:WikiProject Movies, if you did not bother to raise that question on its talkpage... --Jklamo (talk) 17:11, 6 May 2015 (UTC)
Oh, you mean "Wikidata talk:WikiProject Movies"? I'll move the topic there. Gabbe (talk) 17:53, 6 May 2015 (UTC)

Mediation needed

Hi, we have an issue with Succu 2nd revert. I justified my edits, but it seems he won't listen. proton and neutrons are not physical parts of nucleon, they are parts of atomic nucleus (Q37147). They are subclass of nucleons, who is not an inverse of part of per Help:Basic membership properties. I don't know why he reverts and he won't explain. What to do ? TomT0m (talk) 19:19, 6 May 2015 (UTC)

This should now probably either be discussed here or on the talk page before any more edits are made. ·addshore· talk to me! 19:24, 6 May 2015 (UTC)
Please discuss this at Talk:Q102165. I will be commenting there. --Izno (talk) 19:25, 6 May 2015 (UTC)
@Izno, Addshore: Feel free, a thread had been open. TomT0m (talk) 19:27, 6 May 2015 (UTC)

RfC on Wikipedia (EN) on the use of the Persondata template

Although not part of Wikidata, I would like to draw your attention to a current discussion at Wikipedia. I have a feeling some Wikidata bots may utilise this template so there may be people here who would like to make a comment. Discussion here  – The preceding unsigned comment was added by Periglio (talk • contribs).

@Periglio: Thanks for the notification. I'm afraid the English Wikipedia community will turn out to be way too conservative and scared to follow through here. But I hope I'm wrong! Would be great to have all the data here (we probably already have most of it) and deprecate it. It was a very good template to seed Wikidata, but it served it's purpose. Multichill (talk) 20:18, 6 May 2015 (UTC)
My data validation work has shown Wikidata has all the historic data from Persondata. I am more worried about bots that catch new articles and recent deaths, I have no idea if there are any that use Persondata. Periglio (talk) 23:04, 6 May 2015 (UTC)

Proposal for breaking down the tasks towards Wikidata support for Wiktionary

If you are interested, I put up a proposal for how to break down the tasks for enabling Wikidata to support Wiktionary. Input and discussion is very welcome at this stage. I hope that with breaking down the tasks we will get this unstuck, and move towards it a bit sooner. --Denny (talk) 03:02, 7 May 2015 (UTC)

statement suggester / dropdown menu when adding a statement

When adding a new statement to an item, a dropdown menu appears with a list of suggested properties/statements. Is there some sort of order to this list? Is it the most used properties? Is it the properties Wikidata has predetermined that it specifically wants me to fill out? Thanks --Jackson665 (talk) 08:21, 7 May 2015 (UTC)

The suggestions are based on correlation. So the software checks what similar items look like and then suggest what's missing. Similar in this case means similar properties already filled in. --Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) (talk) 12:18, 7 May 2015 (UTC)

Criterion 3 of WD:N

Your input is requested at WT:N#Criterion 3 needs tightening. --Izno (talk) 13:49, 7 May 2015 (UTC)

The datatype of this is String according to the template, but URL according to statements in the entity. It should be string with a formatter url specifying "mailto:". Currently it is only used on one item (with mailto: in the value), so it can be fixed manually. -Hardwigg (talk) 08:14, 26 April 2015 (UTC)

@Hardwigg: mailto will disallow addresses without @. See https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/170906/3/lib/includes/Validators/UrlSchemeValidators.php --GZWDer (talk) 13:03, 26 April 2015 (UTC)
@GZWDer: (Assuming you mean the mailto in the value of an email address (P968) statement; let me know if I misunderstood) That's true, but the user doesn't have to enter "mailto:", and could use another protocol altogether. The format can at least be specified (although not enforced) using regex on the property. There are 3 reasons why I think it should be string:
  • an email address, by itself, doesn't have "mailto:"; adding the mailto protocol creates a link to an email address
  • I'm afraid that this is causing confusion. I've abandoned adding this property myself a number of times, because I didn't realize "mailto:" was necessary, and was confused by the "invalid URL" error I received when I'd entered a very valid email address. I'm afraid this might be why it's only used on 1 item ~1.5 years after this property was created.
  • We would still be able to link the email address using formatter URL (P1630).
-Hardwigg (talk) 21:56, 27 April 2015 (UTC)
It is used so little because until recently there was a bug preventing people from adding it. That is fixed now. --Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) (talk) 11:46, 5 May 2015 (UTC)
Oh, I never realized that! I still think it should be string, but I'm content to see if it sees adoption as URL ;) --Hardwigg (talk) 03:54, 9 May 2015 (UTC)

Level of granularity of properties

We have simultaneous discussions about deleting properties in favour of (i.e. effectively merging them into) more general properties (Wikidata:Properties for deletion#Slovene Cultural Heritage designation (P1597); Wikidata:Properties for deletion#MTR station code (P1377)); and, conversely, splitting specific properties off from the more general (Wikidata:Property proposal/Authority control#Web Gallery of Art id).

On the one hand, more specific properties allow easy use of formatter URL (P1630); on the other, they may make it harder to keep track of what's what.

We need, I think, to agree a policy on this. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 20:00, 30 April 2015 (UTC)

Wikidata:Database reports/List of properties/datatype/string lists 712 properties. Many are identifiers. It would be nice if a table could show
for all of them. Maybe User:Magnus Manske could create a tool or it exists already? List selected properties of all properties of a specific datatype. FreightXPress (talk) 00:05, 1 May 2015 (UTC)
In my opinion it is better to have less but more general properties. These allow lots of reusage at several places which makes translation and connection easier. When a property is used widely it is also clear that the general idea behind that property is the same, even if it is applied in different contexts. In all cases, a general property can be clarified by qualifiers, but usually it is already clear by the context of the item which meaning of the property is relevant in that place. For example, for a station code for a station in Hong Kong it is actually clear that it is an MTR station code and not a London underground station code. Therefore I support reducing the number of properties to a group of general ones. -- Bene* talk 12:28, 2 May 2015 (UTC)
@Bene*: What makes translation easier is, to have a main space item for each Wikidata property that represents an identifier (Wikidata property for an identifier (Q19847637)). At the main space item page properly describe the item via properties:
  • identifies : (e.g. railway station, or railway station in Hong Kong)
  • issued by/maintained by: (e.g. MTR, London Underground)
  • reusable after: (e.g. relevent for ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 codes, as they can be re-assigned after 10 years)
Then connect the property via P1629 with the item, e.g. ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 code (P297) via Wikidata item of this property (P1629) with ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 code (Q1140221). FreightXPress (talk) 13:07, 2 May 2015 (UTC)
Regarding your example, it could also be an Asian-something station code, used in a DB concerned with stations in Asia. It would still be a code for a station in Hong Kong, but not a MTR code.
User:GerardM made a statement about descriptions [1]. It looks a if one is going to merge some selected identifiers into one, while not merging all identifiers into a general property "identifier", one will need more descriptions. So the extreme cases are: 1) one property storing the ID of one ID system 2) one property for storing all IDs. Everything inbetween requires more discussion, documentation and will lead to more confusion. FreightXPress (talk) 13:07, 2 May 2015 (UTC)
I don't see a problem with multiple properties in this case : we can even put a more precise domain constraint or statement for the property. (Tokyo Subway ID domain "Tokyo subway railstation"). We also have subproperties if we want a more generic property like "public transport line ID". TomT0m (talk)
In my opinion these constraints are just not helpful and useless. If you have a "Tokyo Subway ID" property which may only be addded to "Tokyo subway railstation" instances, it is worse than having a general "Subway ID" property which requires a "subway railstation" instance. That the subway station is in Tokyo can be easily expressed by another property. This requires 1.) less properties and 2.) less constraints. Having less things to maintain, translate etc. is always good for obvious reasons. Furthermore, it makes it easier for clients to query things. If I have a tool which lists subway station IDs in several cities, it would require to list all properties which deal with those IDs in the tool. However, having only one general "subway station ID" for all cities makes this a lot easier. One could just query for this ID property and filter the cities by another statement on that item. -- Bene* talk 15:06, 2 May 2015 (UTC)

Just a note : the future identifier datatype will be created and used to sort out identifier statement in the user interface. (Just having one identifier property would mean ... just one property with this datatype :)) TomT0m (talk) 14:40, 2 May 2015 (UTC)

User:TomT0m - Can you point to a page where this was said/agreed? FreightXPress (talk) 18:09, 2 May 2015 (UTC)
This has been discussed in 2013. Wikidata:Requests for comment/How to classify items: lots of specific type properties or a few generic ones?. To summarise that discussion:
  • Option 1 - one 'station ID' property with a 'catalog' qualifier to indicate exactly which ID registry this ID is part of.
Advantage: infoboxes and external queries know exactly what property to search for
Disadvantage: standard tools can't see the qualifier.
  • Option 2 - a separate property for each 'station ID' registry (may be more than one per country).
Advantage: don't need to see the qualifier to get all the information
Disadvantage: you need to know what property to search on so each registry needs a slightly different infobox from infoboxes for every other ID registry. Difficult to deal with stations with multiple IDs
  • Option 3 - a separate 'station ID' property for each station ID registry, all marked as 'subproperty of' a generic 'station ID' property. Use a special search on 'station ID with subproperties' function to search on all these properties at once
Advantage: as 1 and 2 above.
Disadvantage: the 'search including subproperties' function is not part of the current wikidata development plan (though rdfs:subPropertyOf does describe this function).
I have asked for a comment from the development team on the last point. Wikidata:Contact_the_development_team#Lots of specialist properties or fewer properties with qualifiers? Filceolaire (talk) 20:10, 2 May 2015 (UTC)
Link fixed. Filceolaire (talk) 12:45, 3 May 2015 (UTC)
Thanks for the link, Filceolaire. Maybe the time has come to restart this discussion so that we finally have some consistent rules which apply on most places (there will always be exceptions perhaps). -- Bene* talk 09:09, 3 May 2015 (UTC)
@FreightXPress: phab:T95287 Lydia confirms the datatype in a comment. TomT0m (talk) 09:45, 3 May 2015 (UTC)
@TomT0m: Thanks a lot! FreightXPress (talk) 13:03, 3 May 2015 (UTC)
Lydia has confirmed that a "query including subproperties" function is not likely to be developed anytime soon (which I interpret as years rather than months) but that this may be reviewed this summer when other search functions are done. In light of this I recommend we stick with option 1. for now - a few generic properties like "station code" and "significant event" with qualifiers. Later in the year, when the developers have got a query demo system working and can give us a better informed comment, then we can look at this again. Filceolaire (talk) 05:38, 9 May 2015 (UTC)

population+-0

It was discussed before more than a year but with not much attention. There is no reason for numbers to default with an arbitrary +-1. The interface should stop adding precision by default. I did a workshop before one month and gave a task for people to add population. Everyone got frustrated by this and after I told them "type +-0 after the number", the answer/question was "how could we know?". There is no hint! It doesn't work as expected from any one who is not a casual wikidata editor. The expected behaviour is to store what the person has inputed. If it is really need it create an interface like for the date and coordinates data type. But the default should be +-0. Without having to wait for this inteface. --geraki talk 11:01, 4 May 2015 (UTC)

Looking for a template

Hi,

Is there a template that works like Template:Q, but that doesn't show a fallback language if a translation is missing (but instead the Q-number)? That would make it much easier to see what is missing in lists such as the one used in the Menu Challenge.

Best,

John Andersson (WMSE) (talk) 15:25, 8 May 2015 (UTC)

I'm not sure what you mean by "show a fallback language" though I assume you mean "the name of the referenced item in the fallback language". Is that the case? --Izno (talk) 17:06, 8 May 2015 (UTC)
It might be easier to have a custom template (or a subpage of the translation sprint in this case) for the immediate need, however. --Izno (talk) 17:07, 8 May 2015 (UTC)
@John Andersson (WMSE): Jag har ingen lösning till ditt problem, men det kan samtidigt vara lämpligt att de objekt som redan har en label, har det i rätt format. Dvs, på svenska bör vi skriva "sötpotatispaj", inte "Sötpotatispaj", då vi har gemen begynnelsebokstav i svenska substantiv. -- Innocent bystander (talk) 18:04, 8 May 2015 (UTC)
Hi Izno, I think that we are talking about the same thing, yes. Do you happen to be a Master of Templates and willing to help with a custom template :-)? John Andersson (WMSE) (talk) 19:39, 8 May 2015 (UTC)
@Innocent bystander: Jo, absolut. Jag har sett att en del erfarna har fixat med det under dagen. Först tänkte jag länka till någon instruktionssida, men de flesta språk saknar ju sin version av Help:Label. Har du förslag på någon klurig lösning för att guida folk rätt? John Andersson (WMSE) (talk) 19:39, 8 May 2015 (UTC) PS. Sen får man ju poäng om man rättar felaktiga labels. Så den typen av ändringar uppmuntrar vi ju redan till tänker jag. John Andersson (WMSE) (talk) 23:59, 8 May 2015 (UTC)

speedy deletion

please delete this error:

I tried this, because I get a "token" error if I try to add bar/Nicola Sturgeon here, where it would belong:

--Ehgadn (talk) 15:40, 8 May 2015 (UTC)

  Done John F. Lewis (talk) 15:47, 8 May 2015 (UTC)

Users can discuss changes of Wikidata:Notability there.--GZWDer (talk) 06:24, 9 May 2015 (UTC)

Citizenship and country of residence

Hi all, I am wondering whether we need to put a constraint on country of citizenship (P27) to only allow values for time periods after 1850 or so, since the concept of citizenship as we understand it today didn't exist before that. Next we need to break this concept down into its various parts (residents of a country & passport holders, legal aliens & illegal aliens of a country). Anyone interested in working on this? Also, we need to use residence with start and end dates to indicate where people lived and worked. Please point me in the right direction for pre-existing discussions on this. Thx, Jane023 (talk) 10:33, 7 May 2015 (UTC)

The concept of citizenship as such existed long before 1850 - i.e. there was citizenship of Sparta or Roman Empire. It was different citizenship that now, indeed, but it still existed. OTOH, determining actual legal citizenship for many people may be very hard, and something like "country of residence" may be both easier to establish and more useful. --Laboramus (talk) 23:47, 7 May 2015 (UTC)
Country of residence makes not more sense, because for example people within the EU can change the residence frequently without changing the citicenship e. g. because they do university or other education or because they do work in another country. On my behalf I´ve had three different countries of residence in my childhood but never changed citicenship. Artists like opera singers change their residence frequently or even keep several residences at the same time. People can change residence within a day, if they want to and WD can not keep track of it or find a source to proof. Citicenship is defined by law and you can proof it by loking into the passport. Allmost all persons change their residence and only very few people never change residence in their lives, but only few compared to population figures ever change their citicenship and even fewer change their citcenship more than once in the entire life. Persons showing up on a certain place might travel by plane to show up there as a professor might do his lectures half of the week in Berlin, the other half in New York without his students ever noticing.--Giftzwerg 88 (talk) 22:04, 8 May 2015 (UTC)
Thanks for the responses. I am trying to separate the concept as it existed before 1850 to the concept as it exists today. For background, please see this speech about Elusive citizenship by Professor Maarten Vink of Maastricht University. I see that there was previously a country property at P17 and I think this is what I am looking for, but I can't see the discussion where it was deleted. Any thoughts? Jane023 (talk) 07:44, 9 May 2015 (UTC)

Wikidata can improve the quality of medical information on Wikipedia

I am happy to announce that a study has been published in the Journal of Medical Informatics that investigates how Wikidata can improve the medical content on Wikipedia. It was written by members of the Wikidata:WikiProject Medicine: User:Alepfu, John Horn, Richard D. Boyce, User:Matthiassamwald, and me. I think the study should be interesting to anyone involved in Wikidata, and not only those people that edit medical subjects, because the large-scale questions are similar across the different domains of knowledge:

If you have any questions, we will be happy to answer them here.

  Notified participants of WikiProject Medicine --Tobias1984 (talk) 09:44, 8 May 2015 (UTC)

Does not appear to have rolled out here [2] Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 15:04, 8 May 2015 (UTC)
@Doc James: The changes proposed in the study were only made with test-wikidata-items and test-wikipedia-pages. Implementing the changes on Wikipedia-proper would probably cause a lot of problems. The Lua-Module, the Wikidata-Module, and Wikidata itself are still under development, and we decided that implementation should wait until a few things get sorted out and have a stable API. For example: from a long list of drug-drug interactions, it would be good if the module would be able to filter the most important ones (that also contain a source) and then sort them according to their importance. Also the source should be formatted according to the Wikipedia-standards. All those things still need to be worked out and become stable, so we don't break or overload every 2nd infobox. --Tobias1984 (talk) 11:25, 9 May 2015 (UTC)

supplement, complement, summary

for relationships at work level as supplements, complements and summaries, which properties of Wikidata can be used?  – The preceding unsigned comment was added by Nu106 (talk • contribs).

No clue what you mean.. GerardM (talk) 10:11, 9 May 2015 (UTC)

In FRBR (i take quotations from 2008 version) supplement relationship between 2 works is used for index, concordance, teacher's guide etc...complement relatioship is for "involves works that are intended to be combined with or inserted into the related work. In other words, they are intended to be integrated in some way with the other work, but were not part of the original conception of that prior work", summary is for abstract or digest...the concept is that you have 2 different works and you want to connect them. For example: Music for the Motion Picture: Into the Wild by Eddie Vedder is complement of the film Into the Wild by Sean Penn; Indice dei Principia philosophiae di René Descartes : indici lemmatizzati, frequenze, distribuzione dei lemmi by Franco Aurelio Meschini is supplement of Principia philosophia by René Descartes; Oliver Twist summarized by XZ (i invent)is summary of Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens. For this type of relationship what kind of properties wikidata uses?

Wikidata weekly summary #157

New datatype identifier - relation to datatype string - migration

TomT0m just made me aware of phab:T95287 "Identifiers are currently mixed with other statements. This makes it harder to scan the statement section and find relevant information. We should separate out identifiers."

@Lydia Pintscher (WMDE): maybe the following helps on the data side of the migration and helps answering the question: Which of the properties having datatype string are identifiers?

Some days ago I started: Wikidata:Database reports/List of properties/datatype/string.

To help me find out which of the properties are identifiers, I did harmonize several English descriptions that started with "identifier", "ID", "Identifier", or any misspelling like "indentifier", "indentifer" etc. and sorted by description.

I then also started to claim for each that is an identifier "instance of Q19847637". The property itself is not the identifier, any identifier itself would be in the main name space, that is why I choose as a name "Wikidata property representing a unique identifier". It is only linked from properties, so bots can very easily operate based on "instance of Q19847637".

User:Pasleim - can your bot that maintains Wikidata:Database reports/List of properties/all also update Wikidata:Database reports/List of properties/datatype/string? But add one additional column that indicates if the property has "instance of Q19847637"?

I think we need some talk about that. Some people may disagree about what is an identifier, e.g. here @Brya:. The list could help to centralize discussions about whether something is an identifier or not, discussions that otherwise might pop up in various places.

What do you think? FreightXPress (talk) 13:25, 3 May 2015 (UTC)

Wikidata:Database reports/Constraint violations/All properties can be useful. More than 50% string properties have {{Constraint:Unique value}}. — Ivan A. Krestinin (talk) 13:47, 3 May 2015 (UTC)
Ivan, that would be helpful in the table too. Furthermore a column for format as a regular expression (P1793) could be useful. FreightXPress (talk) 18:01, 4 May 2015 (UTC)
P1793 is not actual now, use {{Constraint:Format}} instead. Now we have 715 string properties. 560 properties have {{Constraint:Format}}. 514 properties have {{Constraint:Unique value}}. Many other string properties must have these templates. So the most string properties are identifiers. These properties are widely used already. So we need extending string type functionality, not data migration to new type. — Ivan A. Krestinin (talk) 18:23, 4 May 2015 (UTC)
Ivan, thanks for the statistics. It would be really helpful if any bot could create a table for these values. I also wonder whether User:Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) is listening? Talking about migration without analyzing the data? Maybe instead of migrating ~700 ID-properties one could better migrate the ~15 strings that are not IDs. FreightXPress (talk) 00:26, 5 May 2015 (UTC)
Yes I am reading. And I am not talking about migration without analyzing the data. I have looked into it. The migration is the clean way to handle this. Since we will not be losing the IDs of the properties for this particular migration it'll not cause migration pain for 3rd parties. --Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) (talk) 11:44, 5 May 2015 (UTC)
Lydia, you say "The migration is the clean way to handle this" - and "I am not talking about migration without analyzing the data" - then where is the analysis? Is the result only visible to WMF developers or can ordinary Wikidata editors see it too? Most interestingly: Did you find properties of type string that are not identifiers? FreightXPress (talk) 16:11, 5 May 2015 (UTC)
I am happy to have this discussion with you in a less accusatory tone. We're all here to make this a great project and move it forward. --Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) (talk) 12:52, 6 May 2015 (UTC)
Lydia "I am happy to have this discussion with you in a less accusatory tone." - sounds like an accusation from you against me. Regarding the migration itself: You wrote (A) "I am not talking about migration without analyzing the data". I thought that means before deciding for migration the data is analyzed first. You also wrote (B) "The migration is the clean way to handle this". So, you decided, and given (A) there should be an analysis? I looked for the analysis but couldn't find it, that's why I wondered it might be a secret document only available to some Wikidata people. Can you clarify? FreightXPress (talk) 11:31, 7 May 2015 (UTC)
@FreightXPress: You might be interested in reading this discussion on the mailing list --Pasleim (talk) 11:44, 7 May 2015 (UTC)
@Pasleim: Thank you! That is great help. FreightXPress (talk) 12:35, 7 May 2015 (UTC)
I think almost all string values are somehow or something like an identifier. Everything that resembles a name is an identifier, also label, description and aliases are also identifiers. I mean in a general sense is every information that is needed to identify an entity an identifier. Even sex or gender (P21), father (P22), date of birth (P569), located in the administrative territorial entity (P131) or coordinate location (P625) might be used to identify an entity when the name is not enough. Its just, that those are not unique and not all of them are strings. What we need to keep seprarate is some kind of ontology and the identifiers of external databases. We need to create the ontology tree, the basic properties that are essential in creating something towards semantic web, we do need human brain power for that a 50 Million times. The database identifiers on the other hand is a job for bots. So we should keep these properties separate from identifiers of external databases and have these identifiers in a separate box, just as the wikilinks to the WM-projects. Be aware that some databases can or do not discern diferent entities with the same name. So the identifier might be unique, but it identifies multiple persons. I do not think it is necessary to create a different datatype, we just need to define which properties are to external databasese, and which contribute to the ontology.

External identifiers at wikidata-l

@Pasleim: I am now working through the thread:

FreightXPress (talk) 12:35, 7 May 2015 (UTC)

Strings that are not unique identifiers

Neither RAÄ number (P1262) is fully unique. Not a big deal, since only small parts of the database can be found here. -- Innocent bystander (talk) 08:45, 5 May 2015 (UTC)
How is that no unique? FreightXPress (talk) 16:11, 5 May 2015 (UTC)
@FreightXPress: It's based on a civil parish-name and one, two or three numbers. Gudmundrå 1:1 is a typical RAÄ-nummer. When two or more parishes have the same name, two (or more) RAÄ-numbers can be identical. Torsåker 1:1 can for example be found in three places, one in Ångermanland province (an iron or bronze age grave), one in Gävleborg (an iron age grave) and one in Södermanland (an undated hunting pit). Since Wikipedia have very few articles about these places, it's not a big deal. -- Innocent bystander (talk) 13:45, 7 May 2015 (UTC)

Menu Challenge

Hi,

We would like to invite you to participate in our contest the Menu Challenge starting 8 May! There we would need your help with adding translations, photos and/or audio recordings to Wikidata about ingredients and dishes that will be served on the food fair Taste Stockholm.

We will use your work to show the endless possibilities with open data and crowdsourcing to all the fair's thousands of visitors. So please join us tomorrow! You might even win one of the great prizes. All information how to participate in the contest can be found here. Let's get some #tastydata!

Kind regards, John Andersson (WMSE) (talk) 15:43, 7 May 2015 (UTC)

PS. Please help us spread the word!

Please also share your opinion on this request for a sitenotice. Jan Ainali (WMSE) (talk) 21:13, 9 May 2015 (UTC)

Gadgets

I have checked all the current gadgets in the section "Wikidata-centric" and found few issues:

<translate> SitelinkCheck: Shows a form to check whether a specific site link is already in use and gives the id of the item if so. </translate> – seems to be broken, after adding "title" and confirming it says there's no title given

  • Properties tool: send a request for copy specific property to many items. It will send your request here, and a bot will process the request after review. (Documentation) – has its own page, however it shouldn't be used anymore per User talk:Legobot/properties.js/requests
  • Descriptions: Show the description of items and properties when hovering them. – not sure how it should work but I don't see any descriptions using it

Looking at my common.js:

Matěj Suchánek (talk) 12:03, 4 May 2015 (UTC)

@Matěj Suchánek: Descriptions.js should be working now. --Ricordisamoa 12:56, 8 May 2015 (UTC)
Disabled properties.js. --Ricordisamoa 11:13, 10 May 2015 (UTC)

Wikisource link addition error

I get the following error message "An error occurred while saving. Your changes could not be completed." when trying to add Hill, James John (DNB00) to James John Hill (Q18385235) --Bamyers99 (talk) 18:51, 5 May 2015 (UTC)

Fixed, the wikisource page alredy was on wikidata on item Q19038632, now I have merged the items. --ValterVB (talk) 19:25, 5 May 2015 (UTC)

Template:PingProject

well @ValterVB:, you should not have merge a biographical article on wikisource about James John Hill (Q18385235) to a human (Q5) item :( — what will you do with next biographical article about the same person on en.ws ?
(DNB) texts on wikisource are articles from the Dictionary of National Biography, i.e.... a text, not a person... linking directly articles about a person, published in a book or encyclopedia or periodical to a human (Q5) item blocks any further adding.
if James John Hill (Q18385235) was a writer, he could have an "Author" page on wikisource, which should be linked to it...
see here ;) --Hsarrazin (talk) 10:35, 10 May 2015 (UTC)

Images for cities/villages/towns

What is considered a good candidate for image (P18) for city entity? E.g. - aerial photos? Photo of random location in the city? Map of the city (general, transportation, etc.)? Map of a prominent symbolic location (Eiffel Tower for Paris, Statue of Liberty for New York)? Famous local cuisine? --Laboramus (talk) 23:31, 7 May 2015 (UTC)

@Laboramus: Do you bring this up because I've been adding image (P18) to cities lately? Anyway, I think a montage or skyline is best. --AmaryllisGardener talk 23:45, 7 May 2015 (UTC)
@AmaryllisGardener: Well, I've been looking into the Wikidata Game, which has this images assigning game - and I noticed that for city pages, there's ton on images, but I have no idea which of them are good for image (P18). OTOH, there's something like Tainan (Q140631) which has gazillion of images, and I wonder if such thing won't be better as Commons category. So I wonder what are the established patterns here. --Laboramus (talk) 23:51, 7 May 2015 (UTC)
IMHO I think File:Tainan City's cover.jpg would be the best one. Whatever it ends up with, it doesn't need all of those images listed on that item. --AmaryllisGardener talk 23:54, 7 May 2015 (UTC)
IMO "aerial photo (or at least a general view, they are not always "aerial") or montage" over "a prominent symbolic location" over "random location in the city". I'd discard "map of the city" (we have already other properties for maps, P242, P1621, P15,...) or "food pics". Strakhov (talk) 06:01, 8 May 2015 (UTC)
I think it depends. An aerial photo may be good, but it might also be not very well suited, e.g. an aerial photo of a small village taken from too far away to be able to see more than a blurry group of buildings. A recognizable, prominent location in the village, e.g. the main square, probably is a better choice in such cases. Gestumblindi (talk) 11:16, 8 May 2015 (UTC)
That is way bad practice on that page Laboramus. Is that caused by the Wikidata Game? --Izno (talk) 17:00, 8 May 2015 (UTC)
Izno, I don't really know how that one came to be, but I don't exclude some kind of automatic or semi-automatic way, like the game. That obviously needs to be cleaned up but that's what got me to the bigger question of what should be left in and what should be taken out. --Laboramus (talk) 18:57, 8 May 2015 (UTC)
A specific property for an aerial shot might be interesting. --Izno (talk) 16:58, 8 May 2015 (UTC)

I agree with Laboramus. There needs to be clarified what is considered a good image (P18) image on a city…

the Game does not give instruction, except "Pick an item or file only if it is appropriate and specific for the item (e.g., a picture of an artist, not one by the artist)! Click "No more images" if there are no more files to add."

when confronted to multiple images, people can feel pushed to add more images… a clear definition of what could be added as image (P18) is really needed... map ? panoramic view, center view, street view ? I personnaly don't know, reason why I stopped adding pics to cities, only to human (Q5) which are much easier ;) --Hsarrazin (talk) 10:46, 10 May 2015 (UTC)

To those who contributed to this item, @Giftzwerg 88, Nurni, Michiel1972, Kvardek du: The usage of part of (P361) is incorrect in this case, as those are a subclass of the class, not physical parts like

⟨ Titanic's Hull ⟩ part of (P361)   ⟨ Titanic ⟩

or

⟨ hull (Q426745)      ⟩ part of (P361)   ⟨ boat (Q35872)      ⟩

for the relation of classes. But don't use part of for subclasses ... TomT0m (talk) 17:46, 6 May 2015 (UTC)

I don't see part of (P361) at item of collection or exhibition (Q18593264)      but has part(s) (P527). You mean these claims should be removed? (which I agree) Michiel1972 (talk) 18:44, 6 May 2015 (UTC)
Exactly (If you can explain that to Succu, I would be grateful (see below) :) TomT0m (talk) 19:25, 6 May 2015 (UTC)


Alternative property to avoid such mistakes

What do you think here of creating a property has disjoint subclasses, qualified with qualifiers for the set of disjoint classes ? It seems there is a need for this. This would be a property similar to an OWL one, [AllDisjointClasses]. This would create a correct alternative for those who actually makes these statements. TomT0m (talk) 19:25, 6 May 2015 (UTC)

@Michiel1972:   Done on WD:PP/GEN, disjoint union of and disjoint union. TomT0m (talk) 19:13, 7 May 2015 (UTC)
The main reason why I created this item, is to unite subclasses of different kinds. I then was aware that has part(s) (P527) is not an ideal property to use and it is just an attempt to keep somehow track of the different subclasses. On the other hand it is very usefull in monitoring collection (P195) and inventory number (P217).--Giftzwerg 88 (talk) 17:22, 11 May 2015 (UTC)
@Giftzwerg 88: I don't get your workflow but can't just Reasonator help you ? Just click on the icon of : item of collection or exhibition (Q18593264)     , Reasonator gives the immediate subclasses … TomT0m (talk) 17:35, 11 May 2015 (UTC)
Thank you, very usefull. I do not use resonator very often so I was unaware about the "inverse" abilities of this tool. However the has part(s) (P527) properties give some concept of this item. Nobody can get the concept of this item, if we´d remove has part(s) (P527) without giving some replacement.--Giftzwerg 88 (talk) 17:57, 11 May 2015 (UTC)
@Giftzwerg 88: Maybe it's a labelling problem then ? Maybe artWork in a private collection and artwork in a museum (the class can be split) would be more clear together with an appropriate description ?

Long descriptions

We don't do long descriptions like he is doing, right? Could someone shorten them and post a message in his main language on his talk page? Sjoerd de Bruin (talk) 16:54, 8 May 2015 (UTC)

We try not to. --Izno (talk) 16:57, 8 May 2015 (UTC)
It's not a top priority :) Except by a strange principle I see nothing wrong in his description if he want to do that. The only thing I see is to tell him that its more important to add statements that express the same stuffs if possible. TomT0m (talk) 17:12, 8 May 2015 (UTC)
Repeating the label in the description should be avoided. --- Jura 17:16, 8 May 2015 (UTC)
Descriptions are intended to prevent confusion, not to give a definition of the item. In this case shortening by 90-95% would be a good idea. - Brya (talk) 17:27, 8 May 2015 (UTC)
It's useless to shorten. TomT0m (talk) 17:32, 8 May 2015 (UTC)
I told him both, about the shortening he has been told also a week before.

  Done--Oursana (talk) 17:41, 8 May 2015 (UTC)

Actually, his descriptions are wrong. Per Help:Description#Length descriptions should not be sentences. -- Bene* talk 18:18, 8 May 2015 (UTC)
stong wording here. i see mostly this discussion as an illustration of Parkinson's law of triviality (Q169899)     . Who decides this guidelines ? TomT0m (talk) 18:40, 8 May 2015 (UTC)
I actually think that copying content from Wikipedia and adding it to Wikidata is not trivial but should be stopped. Concerning who decides this guidelines, it is an accepted guideline by the community so the community has decided on those guidelines and so they are valid and have to be followed. -- Bene* talk 18:53, 8 May 2015 (UTC)
@Bene*: It's a standard answer, but where is the original discussion to support that ? It has low impact, so it's not very important, but a few explanation about why this policy below the personal opinion of a few Wikidatan a few years ago would be cool, if nothing else to see if the arguments are still valid a few years after or if after all the constraint are too tight. TomT0m (talk) 19:22, 8 May 2015 (UTC)
Help:Description and some other guidelines often does not make sense for anything but the English language. An example: Talking about that "the" should be omitted in Swedish descriptions does not make sense. It can be a good idea to strive against a nominative form, but to enforce such a rule sometimes gives strange consequences. -- Innocent bystander (talk) 19:43, 8 May 2015 (UTC)
I think the rule to avoid whole sentences can be applied in most languages on the world. -- Bene* talk 19:50, 8 May 2015 (UTC)
It's also not a lot translated in a lot of languages … I don't like dogmas and it looks like one, with no really strongs arguments. I also think ten words is quite short for some items, especially those ith few or no associated wikipages and few statements. TomT0m (talk) 19:54, 8 May 2015 (UTC)
That does not compute. A description is there to disambiguate the item. The fewer "associated wikipages and [...] statements" there are, the less the risk of confusion, and the shorter the description can be. Often enough, one word is enough. It is the items that have many "associated wikipages and [...] statements" that are most likely to be at risk of confusion, and that may well need many words to explain the difference with all the related items. But anyway, keep out detail. - Brya (talk) 05:02, 9 May 2015 (UTC)
I sometime create items for stuffs like mathematical definitons, for example. This can be hard to describe a definition in term of statements. If there is no wp article, the only way to put it precisely is to give the source paper or textbook. But it's unlikely one will read a reasearch paper just to identify an item. TomT0m (talk) 08:53, 9 May 2015 (UTC)
Descriptions are meant to, together with the Label, help to identify the item. They should be short enough to show up, in their completeness, in the Entity Selector, because that is their main and most important use case. So if you have a Label like "Massachusetts" and a Description like "Massachusetts is widely knowns as the largest hill in the Appalachians", this is entirely useless and actually breaks the UX. A Description like "hill" would be much more useful in this case, if it is the only hill of that name. Otherwise "American hill" or "Appalachian hill" might be needed - whatever is needed to provide disambiguation within the knowledge base. This is the background of why the guideline for Descriptions are so strongly worded.
Copying text from Wikipedia might constitute a copyright violation. Data in Wikidata is licensed under CC0, and Wikipedia is licensed under CC-BY-SA, and transferring content from the latter to the former might be problematic. But IANAL. --Denny (talk) 16:37, 9 May 2015 (UTC)
It's a perfectly reasonable mistake to make, so long as the field is labelled "description and not, say, "disambiguator". Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 23:39, 10 May 2015 (UTC)

MDY auto-correct not always working

Of course I like the automatic format corrections for properties such as date of birth (P569) and date of death (P570). However, I noticed that the mdy format isn't always allowed. For instance 11 August 1899 and 11 Aug. 1899 are allowed, but the more formal 11 August, 1899 and 11 Aug., 1899 are not so I can't pull the dates directly from some encyclopedic sources without first editing them. Thanks, Hazmat2 (talk) 19:31, 10 May 2015 (UTC)

We have a ticket for that at phabricator:T67722. --Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) (talk) 11:32, 11 May 2015 (UTC)
Thank you, I didn't see that one. Hazmat2 (talk) 15:39, 11 May 2015 (UTC)

Deleted property still suggested

If you enter the property name “first performance” when creating a statement (using English language), you get two suggestions:

The second is unnecessary, confusing, and annoying. Why is it still suggested? Some cache that needs to be cleared? —DSGalaktos (talk) 21:28, 10 May 2015 (UTC)

I remember seeing the same property. I've created a task. Sjoerd de Bruin (talk) 07:08, 11 May 2015 (UTC)
Alright, thanks! —DSGalaktos (talk) 12:17, 11 May 2015 (UTC)

Is it okay to use qualifier for statements when the target item has the information already

See Tawny Kitaen (Q260298): P19:Q16552, it means place of birth is San Diego but it also has qualifiers about country of San Diego and where it located, etc. These data can be retrieved indirectly from San Diego (Q16552) So I think it's not okay to do this. Am I wrong? Amir (talk) 23:18, 10 May 2015 (UTC)

My take on it is that qualifiers should only be used if needed (ie. page number in a book; years in an education institution). As you wrote, the information can already be parsed from San Diego alone. I understand what you're getting at though. At this point, it's not really a human-readable format without clicking through, but I still don't think that warrants use of qualifiers (which could be incorrect themselves). Hazmat2 (talk) 23:23, 10 May 2015 (UTC)
The qualifiers are redundant, and should in the long term be removed, but for now they are necessary for wiki infoboxes (as I learned a couple of days ago). See Talk:Q4245455#place of death qualifier. —DSGalaktos (talk) 00:58, 11 May 2015 (UTC)
That's understandable, but I thought we weren't supposed to use Wikidata in infoboxes other than for testing purposes at this point. Did this change? Thanks, Hazmat2 (talk) 15:38, 11 May 2015 (UTC)

How to record property examples

I'm seeking community consensus about how to record examples of properties. I recently proposed (and, with no dissent after a week, created) Wikidata property example (P1855).

I originally envisaged it being used like this (with one of a small set of custom properties in the qualifier), but on reflection think it better used like this (with the actual property in the qualifier).

I see no technical reason not to standardise on the latter method. Would there be support for doing so? Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 23:33, 10 May 2015 (UTC)

  • At first I thought that this would be a great idea, but it's not actually giving a good example of how the property might be used (which I think the talk page is for). ie. This has mother (P25) as a qualifier when it would be used as a statement in the current schema. Comments? Hazmat2 (talk) 01:01, 11 May 2015 (UTC)
  • Link showcase items ? This allows to give examples of several properties at once. TomT0m (talk) 08:05, 11 May 2015 (UTC)
  • Not really a good tool: this considers property in one and only one specific case. Most properties are used in combinations of properties and qualifiers then some properties can be used in different way according to different situations. The best solution is IMHO to use the talk page of the properties and to create a section where the different uses can be explained with links to items which use this properties. Talk pages are the place where questions appear and where modifications of use can be settled. We have to concentrate information where people look first it. --Snipre (talk) 12:58, 11 May 2015 (UTC)
  • The previous discussion with Andy about this is at Property_talk:P1855#Which qualifiers?. --- Jura 18:46, 11 May 2015 (UTC)

Wikidata won another award! \o/ - Land der Ideen (Q1206325)

Hey folks :)

I'm really proud to let you know that Wikidata has won another award. The award is part of an initiative to foster innovation in Germany called Land der Ideen. Wikidata is one of the winners for its dedication to the future.

https://www.land-der-ideen.de/ausgezeichnete-orte/preistraeger/wikidata

Time for a high 5, everyone! Thank you for making Wikidata as award-worthy as it is ;-)

Cheers --Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) (talk) 12:01, 11 May 2015 (UTC)

Perhaps we should also update and improve the item about this initiative. It currently has no data at all. :-( -- Bene* talk 13:41, 11 May 2015 (UTC)

d: prefix for Wikidata: pages

I can type, for example, "Wikidata:Project chat" in the search bar to get to this page; but typing "d:Project chat" does not work. It would be useful if it did so (like the "WP:" prefix on en.Wikipedia, for example) Can we make it do so? Do we need a Phabricator ticket for that? Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 13:19, 11 May 2015 (UTC)

Hi Andy, you can write WD:Project chat so WD: is the equivalent of WP: on Wikidata. ;-) -- Bene* talk 13:36, 11 May 2015 (UTC)
OK, thanks. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 17:02, 11 May 2015 (UTC)
"d:" is on the interwiki table and so I'm guessing this won't be technically possible. Bene* points out the way you can do similar here. --Izno (talk) 15:40, 11 May 2015 (UTC)

Chinese question

Is there an equivalent of WikiProject China (Q10816953) or Wikipedia:Proposed article mergers (Q6596462) in Wikidata ? Visite fortuitement prolongée (talk) 13:26, 19 April 2015 (UTC)

There are some proposed merges: User:Byrial/countrymerge, User:Byrial/numbermerge, User:Ivan A. Krestinin/To merge, User:Pasleim/projectmerge. --Infovarius (talk) 05:39, 22 April 2015 (UTC)

What is the meaning of "内蒙古语言" ? Are w:zh:Category:内蒙古语言 and Category:Languages of Inner Mongolia (Q13328614) related? Visite fortuitement prolongée (talk) 21:25, 21 April 2015 (UTC)

内蒙古语言 literally means "Inner Mongolian Languages". the zh category and fr are related.--KTo288 (talk) 21:07, 22 April 2015 (UTC)
Can somebody change Q9536576 into redirect to Q13328614 ? Visite fortuitement prolongée (talk) 19:49, 22 April 2015 (UTC)
  Done Pamputt (talk) 19:54, 22 April 2015 (UTC)
Thank you. Visite fortuitement prolongée (talk) 19:05, 23 April 2015 (UTC)

What is the meaning of "云南语言" ? Are w:zh:Category:云南语言 and Category:Languages of Yunnan (Q13328628) related? Visite fortuitement prolongée (talk) 19:05, 23 April 2015 (UTC)

Yes.--KTo288 (talk) 08:09, 29 April 2015 (UTC)
Then should Category:Languages of Yunnan (Q9508494) and Category:Languages of Yunnan (Q13328628) be merged? Visite fortuitement prolongée (talk) 21:44, 29 April 2015 (UTC)

What is the meaning of "长江水系" ? Are w:zh:Category:长江水系 and Category:Chang Jiang Basin (Q8956112) related? Visite fortuitement prolongée (talk) 19:44, 25 April 2015 (UTC)

What is the meaning of "长江" ? What is the difference between w:zh:Category:长江 and w:zh:Category:长江水系? Visite fortuitement prolongée (talk) 19:43, 26 April 2015 (UTC)

Are Yangtze River basin (Q8115786) and Yangtze River basin (Q15758768) related? Visite fortuitement prolongée (talk) 19:43, 26 April 2015 (UTC)

Are Category:Chang Jiang Basin (Q8956112) and Category:Yangtze River basin (Q15758937) related? Visite fortuitement prolongée (talk) 19:43, 26 April 2015 (UTC)

"长江" is the Yangtze, strictly translated 长江水系 is the Yangtze drainage system, however at zh wiki it seems to be primarily used for tributaries of the Yangtze with w:zh:Category:长江流域 being used for a mix of the geological, geographical, historical and cultural aspects to the river. I'll have a look at how the cats are actually being used in zh:wiki and elsewhere, rather than just how they named, before getting back to you.--KTo288 (talk) 08:09, 29 April 2015 (UTC)
Have you found? Visite fortuitement prolongée (talk) 20:36, 5 May 2015 (UTC)
Then? Visite fortuitement prolongée (talk) 20:40, 11 May 2015 (UTC)

ISSNs for web and print

  Notified participants of WikiProject Periodicals @Andrew Gray, Hsarrazin: Last month I asked: "Faraday Discussions (Q385884) (for example) has two values for ISSN (P236), one for print the other for the online version. Should we use qualifiers, or separate properties to distinguish them. In either case, what should these be, or be called?" Several people said we should use qualifiers, but no-one suggested what these should be. Any suggestions?

I was also told, off-wiki: "There is now also the ISSN-L which is used to link together the various incarnations of the journal in different media (print/electronic/other). The ISSN-L has the same value as one of the existing ISSNs for the journal - so the ISSN-L for Faraday Discussions is 1359-6640 (i.e. same as p-ISSN)". Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 09:54, 28 April 2015 (UTC)

Well, you equally could have consulted, on-wiki, en:International Standard Serial Number... Thus the problem has two dimensions: While in theory the wikidata item for the "periodical-as-work" could be related to additional items for the web and print versions (different dates of first issue / launch, different dates of cessation, or maybe the content is not an 1:1 copy, the print version having different ads, the web version having multimedia annexes to articles...), I agree, that the use of suitable qualifiers (for all these properties) could help avoiding such splits. I'm not sure whether the property for this qualifiers really does exist, applies to part (P518) sound so "phyiscal"... Or - the value of that qualifier could best be exactly the respective ISSN for identification purposes, thus for ISSN (P236) we would need a different set of qualifying values, representing "online" and "print" (usually - there were times where some publications may have been distributed on CD-ROM also - maybe someone finds an example for a serial with a third ISSN for that kind of carrier / distribution media).
The L-ISSN on the other hand is non-unique in princple, and it is always one of the "ordinary" ones. Since I expect that we extremly seldomly will have more than item representing the different forms of a periodical I propobse that instances of ISSN (P236) could be qualified with three cases: "novalue" (this is not the L-ISSN), "this is the L-ISSN and also a valid ISSN for this item" (which one is indicated by a different qualifier, cf. the preceding paragraph), "this is the L-ISSN but not a valid ISSN for this item" (this last case being extremely seldom and it should be kept out of uniqueness constraint reports...).
The situation is similar to books and editions, but much worse over there (items for 19th century works haunted by an arbitrary selection of ISBNs of modern editions in any language whatever, or, three-volume publications having four ISBNs: one for each volume and one for the "set". Or - for authority control: different pseudonyms plus the real identity all have different VIAF identifiers, but the real identity somehow is "distinguished"), perhaps one can learn from the ISSN: "L" stands for "Leader", i.e. it is permissible to view something as distinct entities (each of them with their own distinct ISSN) 'or' to combine the items to something (a group of publications regarded the same content-wise) and in the latter case the combined item should be identified by the distinguished "leader"-identifier. Thus a general property for identifier strings could take the values "leader, valid for this item", "leader, not valid for this item". -- Gymel (talk) 10:38, 28 April 2015 (UTC)
I would suggest the way to express all of the above in wikidata properties is that ISSN (P236) has two values and we use "applies to part" as the qualifier for each value to link to "on-line edition" or "print edition" where these are generic items rather than items representing the specific online and print editions of this publication. If one of the ISSN is identified as the leader then make it "preferred" rank.
For books we will usually have separate items for translations but often we will have one item for all the English language editions, even though their will likely be different ISBNs for the UK and USA editions. We may need to create items for the UK edition and for the USA edition, separate from the main item for the book, with the ISBNs listed in the item for the edition it applies to. This can mean the main item for the book doesn't have any ISBN. OK? Filceolaire (talk) 04:13, 30 April 2015 (UTC)
Very much agreed. However we may think for a moment whether we should now introduce a generic property "applies to version" (or more technically, "applies to expression or manifestation") and use that instead of applies to part (P518): As stated above I have trouble to dissect "the serial" (in several aspects an abstraction quite far away from the world of physical "things") into two parts, namely the "physical exemplars?" and the "electronic" (or online or CD-ROM-based) ones. And furthermore a dedicated (well, general enough to be extensible to "books") property would allow specific constraints checking. -- Gymel (talk) 09:16, 30 April 2015 (UTC)
Filceolaire, Gymel: Regarding the ISBN issue: Popular books may appear in many editions in the same language, each with its own ISBN. For example, Q170583, "Pride and Prejudice" by Jane Austen, certainly was published in dozens of different English-language editions with dozens of different ISBNs (and even more older editions without an ISBN, of course). There's not just an "UK edition" and an "USA edition" of "Pride and Prejudice", there are many. The funny thing is that the only ISBN currently listed in the item is a totally arbitrary one for a French edition - imported from French Wikipedia... I'm not sure that it is meaningful to include ISBNs at all in an item for a work, because an ISBN doesn't identify a work, but just a particular edition of that work. If we follow the FRBR approach, an item such as Q170583 is describing a work, and we would need separate items for individual manifestations (editions) of that work to add the ISBNs there. Gestumblindi (talk) 21:51, 4 May 2015 (UTC)
Gestumblindi, Gymel I agree that for "Pride and Prejudice" the item referring to the book should be about the first edition and, as such, will not have an ISBN because they didn't exist back then. Each French translation should have it's own 'edition' item with it's ISBN and other data related to that translation. Use 'edition' and 'edition of' properties to link between the book and the various translations. If a translation is crowd sourced on the web then it is another edition. Though it won't have an ISBN it will have a publisher, publication date etc. Filceolaire (talk) 22:58, 4 May 2015 (UTC)
@Filceolaire: I was under the understanding that this project followed the FRBR model, and that as such the work item was something different that the first edition item ... TomT0m (talk) 06:34, 5 May 2015 (UTC)
Possibly there is enough room for both approaches. At least the FRBR model does not employ the concept of "book" at all... -- Gymel (talk) 06:40, 5 May 2015 (UTC)
Gymel, yes, as "book" is rather diffuse: When you're talking about a "book", what do you mean? A particular physical copy currently on your desk? In FRBR terms, that would be an "item" - and only meaningful as a Wikidata item for certain rare or unique books, not for one of thousands of identical copies. You might also refer to a particular edition, such as the 2008 Oxford University Press edition of "Pride and Prejudice", an FRBR "manifestation": All copies (items) of this edition (manifestation) "bear the same characteristics, in respect to both intellectual content and physical form". For Wikidata, this would be the base for an item with a particular ISBN. Or you might refer to a particular French translation of "Pride and Prejudice", an FRBR "expression" that may have several manifestations (editions with differing ISBNs). Finally, you might be talking about the work as such, "Pride and Prejudice" as an "artistic creation". As I see it, a Wikidata item about a work probably shouldn't contain ISBNs, as they're - as said above - not referring to the work. But we already have many "book" (=work?) items with ISBNs; so - maybe the ISBNs should all be removed or converted (with the help of a bot? bibliographical data from library catalogues?) to edition items? - The current definition of Q571 ("book") might be fundamentally flawed. The description says: medium for a collection of words and/or pictures to represent knowledge, often manifested in bound paper and ink, or in e-books - so, it looks as if Q571 is referring to expressions and/or manifestations, but actually is often applied to works. Gestumblindi (talk) 20:54, 5 May 2015 (UTC)
Gestumblindi Sure, it's a complete mess (at least from a strict Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (Q16388) perspective) and the Wikidata:Books task force does not appear to have had much impact. OTOH we do need much more "books" (and articles like this discussion here is about) here in wikidata to serve as reference. And training the average editor to a state of mind where anything "bibliographic" has to be represented by at least three different wikidata items does not seem very feasible to me (but noticing that The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (Q1164083) is a "book" with an ISBN-13 also hurts. BTW according to WorldCat the ISBN stands for the 1967 Penguin edition, way back in time before introduction of the ISBN system. Thus Sterne would be highly satisfied I presume). -- Gymel (talk) 21:17, 5 May 2015 (UTC)
TomT0m, Gymel, Gestumblindi I agree that most of the wikidata items labelled 'instance of:book' should be changed to 'instance of:literary work' (or a subclass of literary work such as novel, textbook, biography etc.) however there are a few actual individual copies of published books with their own wikidata item (See Category:Individual Bibles (Q8546779) for instance) so be sure those stay as 'instance of:book'.
I also agree that having a separate item for the literary work and for the first edition of that work is probably a better scheme but in practice we don't lose a lot of info by combining these concepts and we have the option to fix it later once we have the data in the system so I personally am not going to get to worked up over it. Hope this helps. Filceolaire (talk) 01:13, 7 May 2015 (UTC)
But that is for books. Going back to the ISSN numbers for serials as originally raised by Andy Mabbett; these numbers are for all editions of a periodical publication. There are ways of adding extra digits to extend the ISSN into an EAN and for adding further digits to indicate the issue number but the bare ISSN is for all the issues of a magazine or other serial journal. As such it is entirely appropriate that the generic item about the magazine/journal should have all the ISSNs associated with that magazine/journal with each ISSN value having the qualifier 'applies to part' to indicate if the ISSN is for the online or the print edition. If one of the ISSNs is identified as the 'Leader' then make this the preferred value for the ISSN. That is my opinion. Filceolaire (talk) 01:13, 7 May 2015 (UTC)
(Not sure what you mean by "editions" here) But are they really parts? I would consider a single article, or a single issue or the 1985 volume as "parts" of a serial. But - sorry for slipping into the "books" analogy back again - I would not consider the eBook edition of (the french version of) “Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!” (Q2743592) a "part" of that work/expression. Nor a paperback edition(?) of Diary of a Wimpy Kid (Q1339580) (many independent volumes) or the HD download version of the director's cut of the complete The Hobbit trilogy (Q74331). So why a general series/serial/periodical splitting in "parts" for qualifying purposes? There surely must be a property better suited for that. -- Gymel (talk) 05:48, 7 May 2015 (UTC)
Shame: Ages-old distribution format (P437) should be exactly the qualifier we have been looking for. Since neither of hardback (Q193955), paperback (Q193934) or digital distribution (Q269415), download (Q7126717) are really suitable for serials, we might consider creating dedicated items pISSN, eISSN (and perhaps ISSN-L) as possible values for that property when used as a qualifier for ISSN (P236). There lies a slight logical fallacy, namely e.g. "eISSN" is not the name for a distribution method (that would be online) but rather a shorthand form for "this is the appropriate ISSN when referencing the serial for the 'e' distribution method". But qualifying ISSN (P236) with instance of (P31) would be a bit too generic IMHO and using something like acid-free paper as target values for distribution format (P437) might prevent 95% of users from recognizing the ISSN qualified as such being a P-ISSN... -- Gymel (talk) 19:30, 11 May 2015 (UTC)

Bot updated statements and frequency

I have been in talks with Statistics Sweden (Q1472511) and they will soon have a new version of their API. From that they are interested in helping building a bot to keep the current municipality of Sweden (Q127448) (290 items) with the newest figures on population (P1082) (these statistics are released monthly). Now, would we want monthly updates and if so, how should it be handled? Should the statement be updated every time with a new qualifier point in time (P585) or should a new one be added, keeping the previous one and the history? If the latter, the items will grow pretty big over time. One could also make a combination, e.g. updating the statement during the year but create a new one when a new year starts, thus only adding one new statement per year. I would be very happy to hear your thoughts on this before moving on with my talks with them. Jan Ainali (WMSE) (talk) 08:04, 11 May 2015 (UTC)

  • The size of the items currently affects how useful the item is for Wikipedia. (i. e. you can technically reach a memory-limit in a Lua module.) Therefor we maybe should put a limit to how much today should be added in the items.
I have earlier proposed that we should have a kind of "demographics"-property, which links to an item who is designated to only include such things as population.
-- Innocent bystander (talk) 11:23, 11 May 2015 (UTC)
    • We shouldn't limit the possibilities of Wikidata just because of technical limits. The idea of Wikidata is to have all the data stay in there. Old data should not be deleted at all, but only be marked as deprecated or the current data as preferred. However, I agree that we have to take care not to flood the user interface and we have to fix the technical limitations when using Lua etc. All statements should of course have a "point in time" qualifier. -- Bene* talk 13:47, 11 May 2015 (UTC)
      @Bene*: I said "currently". I will gladly invite Statistics Sweden to add numbers for every year (or month) since 1860 when we know the limits in the software allows it. Every template about Swedish localities using Wikidata will, by the help or arbitrary access, load the content of every item in the whole hierarchy of administratrative division (both of them). If the sum of these items exceeds the memory-limits for Lua, the use of Wikidata fails, and we loose a lot of reputation. -- Innocent bystander (talk) 15:27, 11 May 2015 (UTC)
      Perhaps there should be some mechanics in Lua that only preferred statements are loaded (if there are some, otherwise only normal ranked ones). This way we can avoid having memory problems because there will be only one or two preferred statements while all normal/deprecated statements would not be loaded at all. -- Bene* talk 16:01, 11 May 2015 (UTC)

For comparison: de:Wikipedia:Schweiz/Open Government Data, Open Data Zürich, i.e. population data at Q382903. I think de:user:Micha L. Rieser was involved in this initiative. HTH, --Atlasowa (talk) 15:13, 11 May 2015 (UTC)

a possible new connectivity-related flag or function

FYI:m:Wikimedia_Forum#Allow_autoconfirmed_users_to_move_pages_without_leaving_redirects.--Alexmar983 (talk) 19:07, 11 May 2015 (UTC)

AltLabels again

It's been a month since the last discussion about AltLabels not working, anything new? Pinging Hsarrazin, who may also be interested. --AmaryllisGardener talk 00:13, 9 May 2015 (UTC)

yep, still interested... nothing new though :( --Hsarrazin (talk) 10:09, 10 May 2015 (UTC)
sorry for the slow reply, i've been quite busy recently... should be fixed now. Joern (talk) 11:15, 12 May 2015 (UTC)
Thank you so much Joern! :D --AmaryllisGardener talk 16:06, 12 May 2015 (UTC)
Yooohoooooooooo !!!! Thank you so much Joern !
I really missed that one :D --Hsarrazin (talk) 21:27, 12 May 2015 (UTC)

Oscar films

There are still 139 Oscar films missing (see here). Let's create those items. --Jobu0101 (talk) 20:29, 11 May 2015 (UTC)

You can use http://tools.wmflabs.org/wikidata-todo/creator.html to create those items, e.g.
CREATE
LAST	Len	"Popular Science"
LAST	P345	"tt0026880"

--Pasleim (talk) 22:37, 12 May 2015 (UTC)

"Deprecated" Languages

I have had some labels in "Simple English" removed by User:AkkakkBot. I see that simple is a deprecated language on his list (User:Akkakk/issues/deprecated-languages). However, I have never seen a policy nor a rule about this situation, and I do have a couple of questions about it.

  • If people are really not supposed to add labels for such languages, why does the possibility even exist in the software? Why don't we just remove the capability?
  • I would argue against this. The label itself might be identical to that of en (or en-gb or en-ca), but I sometimes write the description a little differently so as to conform to practice in Simple English Wikipedia and Simple English Wiktionary. I think this might sometimes be important to be able to do.

I'll admit that I was on an off-and-on Wikibreak for a while, but was "deprecating" simple as a language ever discussed with the communities at the simple projects? StevenJ81 (talk) 13:43, 12 May 2015 (UTC)

Some things happen without proper documentation. If the bot removes simple, it could point to the policy/regulation that enacted this. Did it link to something like that? FreightXPress (talk) 22:01, 12 May 2015 (UTC)
If I understood it right, simple is not considered to be a language nor is it a language code but it is the name of a project written in English. See the global variable $wgDummyLanguageCodes and the initial setting file. That you still can add terms in simple is a bug which is tracked on phabricator. --Pasleim (talk) 22:28, 12 May 2015 (UTC)
I think that en-gb and en-ca should be kept, but simple should not. Simple English is about the content of the articles being simple, not really the titles. --AmaryllisGardener talk 23:06, 12 May 2015 (UTC)
I agree. However, they should only exist when they differ from standard English and tbh it is a travesty that it should be en-us. GerardM (talk) 06:14, 13 May 2015 (UTC)

Property for disease chronicity

I can't seem to find a good property to describe disease chronicity (ie. acute, subacute, chronic). Any ideas before creating a new property? Thanks, Hazmat2 (talk) 20:27, 12 May 2015 (UTC)

Arbitrary access is coming to the first wikis

Hey folks :)

When using data from Wikidata on Wikipedia and other sister projects there is currently a limitation in place which hinders some use cases. Data can only be accessed from the corresponding item. So for example the article about Berlin can only get data from the item about Berlin but not from the item about Germany. This had technical reasons. On Monday we will remove this limitation on the first wikis. This will be Dutch Wikipedia and French Wikisource. (More will follow over the next weeks. We hope to have it rolled out nearly everywhere by the end of June.) We invite you to play around with this new feature if you are one of the people who have been waiting for this for a long time. If you have technical issues/questions with this you can come to Wikidata:Contact the development team.

A note of caution: Please be careful with how many items you use for a single page. If it is too many page loading might get slow. We will have to see how the feature behaves in production to see where we need to tweak and how.

How to use it once it is enabled:

Cheers --Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) (talk) 19:33, 6 May 2015 (UTC) (who is very happy this is finally getting out)

YAY! :) ·addshore· talk to me! 19:35, 6 May 2015 (UTC)
Progress! Harej (talk) 19:39, 6 May 2015 (UTC)
Awesome \o/ -- Bene* talk 20:00, 6 May 2015 (UTC)

 ______________________________________
/ GÉNIAL                               \
| Arbitrary Access that's great        |
| One more missing peace of the puzzle |
\                                      /
 --------------------------------------
  \
   \          .
       ___   //
     {~._.~}// 
      ( Y )K/  
     ()~*~()   
     (_)-(_)   
     Luke    
     Skywalker
     koala TomT0m (talk) 
Haha nice! --Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) (talk) 20:13, 6 May 2015 (UTC)
Excellent news! I've taken the liberty of copying the body of your comment to Wikidata:Arbitrary access (not least so I can tweet links to a stable URL!) and the whole of it to that page's talk page. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 21:20, 6 May 2015 (UTC)
Amazing! \o/ Tpt (talk) 06:57, 7 May 2015 (UTC)
  --ValterVB (talk) 11:49, 7 May 2015 (UTC)
Finally, another step towards multi-language support, too! :) Vogone (talk) 12:02, 7 May 2015 (UTC)
Yay! \o/   :D --AmaryllisGardener talk 16:43, 7 May 2015 (UTC)

Hey folks :) We've now enabled arbitrary access on Dutch Wikipedia and French Wikisource. Please let me know if you run into any issues. I hope you'll build great things with this. More wikis coming soon. --Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) (talk) 14:15, 11 May 2015 (UTC)

Creator?

Just to share... I put instance of human for someone today and instead of "sex and gender" being the next statement to pop up, this time it asked for "creator." ;-) Hazmat2 (talk) 16:31, 13 May 2015 (UTC)

Nice - I think therefore I am, or creator first, then gendered? Jane023 (talk) 17:07, 13 May 2015 (UTC)

Nepal Earthquake - help

Hi,

I'm part of a team of volunteers trying to gap the days between the earthquake and the official responses from gov't and iNGOs. We've been gathering tons of data. To map this data, I need to coordinates of the VDCs (listed here (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_village_development_committees_of_Nepal). Unfortunately, I have no clue how to go about this.

Can somebody help?

Also, apologies for (probably) not posting this in the right spot!

Thanks!

Thomas  – The preceding unsigned comment was added by Tompkh (talk • contribs).

In Wikidata there are 2980 village development committee of Nepal (Q1530705) with geocoordinates, 260 VDCs are missing coordinates. A list of all VDCs with coordinates you can find here --Pasleim (talk) 07:59, 7 May 2015 (UTC)

@Pasleim, Tompkh: According to the en:2011 Nepal census there are 3915 Village Development Committees in 75 districts (en:List_of_districts_of_Nepal). (The en:List_of_village_development_committees_of_Nepal is based on en:2001_Nepal_census data which lists also "over 3,900" Village Development Committee (VDC) in 75 districts.) So wikidata is missing out on ~1000 VDC. You can try to retrieve more information from Wikipedia, but this can get messy:

There will be settlements that are not VDC (just villages) and maybe VDC that are not marked as VDC in Wikidata. Hope this helps! ;-) --Atlasowa (talk) 10:02, 7 May 2015 (UTC)

  • Thank you for 2 cool tools for coordinates! And is it possible to do the same for Wikidata coordinates (for examples, display on OSM results of some WDQ)? --Infovarius (talk) 11:33, 14 May 2015 (UTC)

Objects with most interwikis, but not present in specific language

How can I find those objects which are existing in most languages except dewp? For example giant impact hypothesis (Q723219) has 29 entries, but no one in dewp.--Kopiersperre (talk) 18:59, 10 May 2015 (UTC)

Try toollabs:wikidata-terminator and in particular [3]. -- Bene* talk 19:10, 10 May 2015 (UTC)
@Bene*: Sorry for bothering you: How do I exclude templates and categories?--Kopiersperre (talk) 21:14, 10 May 2015 (UTC)

@Kopiersperre: The query noclaim[31:11266439] (no template) did not work for me, but listing only items from a specific area of interest does work, e.g. geographical objects claim[279:(tree[618123][][279])] :

  • https://tools.wmflabs.org/wikidata-terminator/?list&lang=de&mode=tx&q=claim[279:(tree[618123][][279])]
  • https://tools.wmflabs.org/wikidata-terminator/?list&lang=en&mode=tx&q=claim[31:(tree[15916867][][279])]

FreightXPress (talk) 22:14, 12 May 2015 (UTC)

A noclaim value can't stand on its own and this tool only allows you to limit a search based on a WDQ, you can't subtract those results the way you can by parsing a category and a WDQ in Autolist. At the moment, the best solution I can think of would be the following:
  • https://tools.wmflabs.org/wikidata-terminator/?list&lang=de&mode=tx&q=link[enwiki] AND noclaim[31:(tree[15474042][31][279])]
The Terminator tool runs on cached results (I assume limited to 5000 items) which means that even if you can filter out meta pages, you would over time get fever and fever actual content results as meta pages take over the cache. This could be solved if the tool was rewritten to exclude items that are subclasses of MediaWiki page (Q15474042) when the cache is made. Väsk (talk) 17:30, 14 May 2015 (UTC)

2015 Cannes Film Festival

How do we mark the 19 films competing for the Palme d'Or on the 2015 Cannes Film Festival? --Jobu0101 (talk) 15:38, 13 May 2015 (UTC)

I would say --Pasleim (talk) 08:14, 14 May 2015 (UTC)

N6I

Does anyone know who or what the authority record for N6I belongs to? I noticed it popping up over at VIAF. Example. Hazmat2 (talk) 04:50, 14 May 2015 (UTC)

Stations

Well I solved the problem I had. https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q1434642 and added the relevant quantity data.

Does anyone know of a database or FOI request that holds station distance data for the London tube network, that's compatible with the licensing used here?

ShakespeareFan00 (talk) 11:07, 14 May 2015 (UTC)

You can delete all your contributions: we plan to use a special datatype to manage values with unit. All your edits will have to be modified so better avoid to use your system which just will add more conversion work later. Snipre (talk) 11:35, 14 May 2015 (UTC)
Hey, I think you could say this in a nicer way. Telling someone that they can delete all their contributions sounds somewhat offensive. Furthermore, the edits are not useless at all. A bot can move them to the new datatype quite easily once it is there. -- Bene* talk 12:18, 14 May 2015 (UTC)
I hope you will be there the moment the job will be done. And for my tone, I choose the one which corresponds to this contributor: the direct one. No needs of reading blabla or other help pages. Snipre (talk) 13:16, 14 May 2015 (UTC)
Removed the depreceated approach per SnipreShakespeareFan00 (talk) 20:37, 14 May 2015 (UTC)

Lists for Wikipedia

Hoi, I blogged about lists on Wikipedia. These lists make use of Wikidata.. It is based on a tool of Magnus.. Have a read.. Thanks, GerardM (talk) 14:06, 14 May 2015 (UTC)

Glad to see people talking about this - there is certainly potential for more widespread use of those lists (and resonator, etc) and it is awesome to spread the word about it :) Ajraddatz (talk) 05:33, 15 May 2015 (UTC)

T-shirts!

If you are interested: m:Merchandise giveaways/Nominations. They are giving away T-shirts to wiki-users. You can candidate someone you know or "vote" for the ones who have already been proposed.--Alexmar983 (talk) 16:21, 11 May 2015 (UTC)

When they were Wikidata t-shirts I would have idea ... Wikipedia I love but it is not my thing. GerardM (talk) 15:14, 12 May 2015 (UTC)
Well, I though that if you know somewone who is active on a "content"/"local" wikipedia and here, that's still a nice gift ;)--Alexmar983 (talk) 09:17, 13 May 2015 (UTC)
Let's suggest they get some Wikidata t-shirts. Who knows, maybe they already have them ;). All the best, Taketa (talk) 17:03, 16 May 2015 (UTC)

How to recruit translators for Wikibase

At translatewiki.net, we are focusing on expanding language coverage for MediaWiki. The main tools are prioritisation and targeted communication. Wikibase is currently included in the "Main Wikimedia extensions", whose statistics you can see at translatewiki:Translating:Group statistics. The group is meant for translators looking for more messages to translate after MediaWiki core, without digging in the mare magnum of obscure and sometimes little-used extensions. However, I have two concerns:

  1. Wikibase has a lot of messages, over 600 (see list), making up about 20 % of the group (which contains dozens of extension);
  2. messages are often quite specialistic and always require knowledge of the Wikidata glossary.

My impression is that "general" translators have to spend a lot of effort translating these messages and that most translations come from Wikidata users anyway, at least for bigger languages (see list of translators). Do you see a value in this promotion of the extension, or can it be put in the more general bucket of "Wikimedia extensions"? --Nemo 08:13, 14 May 2015 (UTC)

I think it should be a seperated group. Some messages are hard to find. Sjoerd de Bruin (talk) 07:24, 16 May 2015 (UTC)

502 Bad Gateway. --Jobu0101 (talk) 08:54, 16 May 2015 (UTC)

It works for me at the moment but remember that his endpoint is still beta and not really an official query service. There is no guarantee that it works all the time. -- Bene* talk 09:55, 16 May 2015 (UTC)
It's back up, assuming this is caused by this problem, but I'm not sure. Multichill (talk) 10:26, 16 May 2015 (UTC)

Importing actor's height from ImDB

Hi,

I was wondering if it is allowed and/or a good idea to import actors height from ImDB, e.g. http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0331516/?ref_=nv_sr_1

Wolf

  • We need units on Wikidata first. Sjoerd de Bruin (talk) 07:03, 11 May 2015 (UTC)
  • Is ImDB a reliable source for this kind of data ? Then what is the utility of a property which can be fulfilled for most of the persons which have an element in WD ? The target of WD is not to concentrate all information of the web but to create a database. And a database can be useful only when a description model can be applied to all elements of the database. What is the use of a height property used in a very specific field like actors ? You can't do any statistics because the group is too small and not representative of the world population. Then what's about actors who played as child and never continue the actor career after this period of their life ? This property will be time dependent and this reduce again its use. --Snipre (talk) 13:09, 11 May 2015 (UTC)
  • IMDb is not a reliable source for height data, but we do need to store height data once the new datatype comes in. We probably need to restrict the use of a height property to items about persons that are 18+ years old. --AmaryllisGardener talk 13:15, 11 May 2015 (UTC)
I don't think we need to restrict a height property in this way. Instead we just give the 'height' statement a 'point in time' qualifier. Filceolaire (talk) 14:21, 11 May 2015 (UTC)
I guess that'd work fine too. --AmaryllisGardener talk 15:47, 11 May 2015 (UTC)
I also like Filceolaire's approach. I'm assuming that the goal is to not record the height of a child, and discover that he or she has grown up since then (rather than protecting someone's privacy). If so, then age 16 might have been good enough, since most kids have stopped growing by then. However, age alone couldn't be the predictor. Some kids die, or stop growing young due to medical issues; some adults shrink (especially due to osteoporosis) and rarely grow more (hormonal issues). "X height on Y date" can easily handle all of these situations. (And also turn into a growth chart for certain famous children, but we might need to accept that cost.) WhatamIdoing (talk) 06:16, 17 May 2015 (UTC)

FWD: the shape of a stroopwafel

User talk:Edoderoo#Can real objects be circles? --Ricordisamoa 00:00, 17 May 2015 (UTC)

Here is a complicated one.

The childrens book series Animal Ark (Q4764759) is published under the collective pseudonym Lucy Daniels (Q19872456) in the UK representing the group of authors who wrote these books under the direction of Ben M. Baglio (Q4886094). So far so good.

When these books were republished in the USA the pseudonym was changed to Ben M. Baglio so now

  1. Ben M. Baglio is both the manager of the books and is also the collective pseudonym for the group of authors (which may or may not include Ben M. Baglio the man)
  2. the UK and the USA editions of these books have different authors.

How many item do we need to create to represent this?

This is not a trivial issue. 'Lucy Daniels" has sold more books in the UK than J. K. Rowling! Filceolaire (talk) 08:33, 9 May 2015 (UTC)

What do you want to know ? How many items for the authors group/manager or for the editions of the books ?
As far as I understand the problem, two items are necessary to represent Ben M. Baglio as group/manager and as person. Then three item for each book: one for the work without author, one for the UK edition with the item of Lucy Daniels (Q19872456) as author and one for the US edition with the item of Ben M. Baglio (group) as author. Work item should have only the common information valid for all editions. --Snipre (talk) 18:50, 9 May 2015 (UTC)
@Snipre:, @Filceolaire:, couldn't we use qualifiers to reduce the number of items? --Denny (talk) 15:57, 16 May 2015 (UTC)
@Denny:, No we can't if we consider translations too: we can have a second edition in French and in English and then we can have several editions in different publishers in different languages for very famous books. This can't be solved by qualifiers. For simple cases yes, you can mix and use qulaifiers but you have to design a system according to the most complex cases in order to be sure to extract data using an unique pattern. Snipre (talk) 08:49, 17 May 2015 (UTC)

Roman Catholism

Hoi, according to some "catholism" and "Roman catholism" is the same. It follows that pope Francis is no longer the head of the Roman Catholic church.. I am appalled that someone merged the two. It needs urgent action in order to undo the damage. No, I am not volunteering... Thanks, GerardM (talk) 14:47, 9 May 2015 (UTC)

Not sure what you mean. Do you mean "Pre-Reformation Catholic" (Old Catholics (Q5169816)) vs. "Post-Reformation Catholic" (Pope in Vatican)? Jane023 (talk) 17:36, 9 May 2015 (UTC)
Ayackbot changed the statements for religion incorrectly. They need to be mass changed to their previous condition. Thanks, GerardM (talk) 18:36, 9 May 2015 (UTC)
GerardM, I don't understand your point. I replaced religion or worldview (P140): Catholic Church (Q9592) by religion or worldview (P140): Catholicism (Q1841) because the second is a religion while the first isn't. What's the matter? — Ayack (talk) 10:09, 11 May 2015 (UTC)
Ayack please look at the descriptions, not just the labels. If you do you will see that "Catholic Church (Q9592)" is for the religion led by the Pope and "Catholicism (Q1841)" is for a wider concept including some bits not under the Pope's authority. Please undo your change (but be careful not to move stuff that really should be under "Catholicism (Q1841)") Filceolaire (talk) 13:16, 11 May 2015 (UTC)
As for sure there are different kinds of catholics. Catholicism (Q1841) is some kind of religious movement. It is difficult to descripe people as a member or part of a movement. In most cases it will be better to assign a person to a specific organisation (as a church or an order). Somebody can be a member of the organisation without beeing part of the movement or vice versa. By the way Old Catholics (Q5169816) are not "pre-reformation catholics", they are catholics that refused to accept First Vatican Council (Q190857), while Society of Saint Pius X (Q868160) refuse to accept Second Vatican Council (Q169789), but in all definitions including their own they are still catholics. Both accept Council of Trent (Q172991) which is clearly not the age of pre-reformation.--Giftzwerg 88 (talk) 17:43, 11 May 2015 (UTC)
I have asked Amir to undo these edits... Sadly the "perps" do not take responsibility :) Thanks, GerardM (talk) 12:30, 17 May 2015 (UTC)

Merging two items

Not sure if there is any discussion site which only deal such issues but I want to suggest merging two items: Q6331763 (Politics templates) and Q6421011 (Politics and government templates). I can understand why it has not yet been done, so that is why I want to bring it up for discussion. Any thoughts? Kristian Vangen 21:23, 16 May 2015 (UTC)

There's a language conflict for ar and vi. So merging won't be possible. Lymantria (talk) 07:17, 17 May 2015 (UTC)

AWACS

@1776004789风不止: Does anyone see reason why airborne early warning and command system (Q408110) was split? (Check history.) I have undone links which were not readded. Matěj Suchánek (talk) 08:16, 17 May 2015 (UTC)

This kind of edits happen everyday. It seems like they don't understand our project, so they remove ALL sitelinks. Sjoerd de Bruin (talk) 09:00, 17 May 2015 (UTC)
I've merged a few items which that user seems to have jumbled up. Revert if I've misunderstood any differences between them. Prefall (talk) 14:40, 17 May 2015 (UTC)

Information to all the users of Wikidata

Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees Elections 2015 has been started. Please Follow the link https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:SecurePoll/vote/339 to vote for Trustees of Wikimedia Foundation Board. --Tulsi Bhagat (Talk) 14:23, 17 May 2015 (UTC)

I am running as one of the candidates. The candidate presentations and the questions provide plenty of reading material for making an informed choice. I would be happy to see Wikidata well represented among the voters! --Denny (talk) 17:12, 17 May 2015 (UTC)

 

This is a message from the 2015 Wikimedia Foundation Elections Committee. Translations are available.

Voting has begun for eligible voters in the 2015 elections for the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees. Questions and discussion with the candidates for the Board will continue during the voting.

The Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees is the ultimate governing authority of the Wikimedia Foundation, a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization registered in the United States. The Wikimedia Foundation manages many diverse projects such as Wikipedia and Commons.

The voting phase lasts from 00:00 UTC May 17 to 23:59 UTC May 31. Click here to vote. More information on the candidates and the elections can be found on the 2015 Board election page on Meta-Wiki.

On behalf of the Elections Committee,
-Gregory Varnum (User:Varnent)
Volunteer Coordinator, 2015 Wikimedia Foundation Elections Committee

Posted by the MediaWiki message delivery 17:20, 17 May 2015 (UTC) • TranslateGet help

Wikimedia category & Wikimedia category page

Hello,

Are they duplicates or is it a real distinction between those entries ?
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q6850493
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q8958996

Thanks,

Jona (talk) 13:36, 13 May 2015 (UTC)

The first one is "Open source games" and the latter is at least in Swedish "Open source computer games". --Stryn (talk) 15:27, 13 May 2015 (UTC)
@Jona, Stryn: I guess "Open source games" and "Open source computer games" both can be translated to "Fria datorspel" in Swedish, since "open source" imply a "dator".
But "Fria" does not necessarily always means "open" in Swedish, it can also mean "gratis". But it looks like "open source" is the main content of the category, but examples of "gratis datorspel" also exists there. -- Innocent bystander (talk) 08:08, 14 May 2015 (UTC)
@Stryn: There is also "Open source video games" https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q13279461 I keep on thinking that a clean up is necessary but I can't go further with my knowledge (is there a banner of some kind ?). Thanks Jona (talk) 21:10, 17 May 2015 (UTC)

Subclasses of Wikimedia categories

I created a database report with the most linked category items. It turned out that we have couple of items about Wikimedia categories with subclass of (P279) claims, e.g.

In my opinion this are highly questionable claims as each wiki has its onw category system and so the claims are not in general true. Moreover, it can happen that category system get rearranged and therefore the claims are not stable. Is there any point in keeping such claims? --Pasleim (talk) 12:57, 14 May 2015 (UTC)

@Pasleim: In your example it's highly questionable indeed, as it reflects the problems of the category system that we can avoid : see Help:Classification. the Template per country item seems not a class, but a class of class. France template and USA templates for example are subclass of templates indeed, but they could be instances of class of template of a specific country. Template:Politics of Rwanda (Q13471959) is a Rwanda related template, it's certainly not a Category:Country templates (Q3848)     , as it should be if the properties of subclass of and instance of are relevant here. TomT0m (talk) 13:25, 14 May 2015 (UTC)
This subclass is not depending on the category system on a wiki. On the item of templates in Rwanda, it is connected to both the category group of templates of countries and the category group of templates from Africa. Between the categories there is a relationship. As long as that relationship is preserved, even with the usage of other properties, I am fine with changes. Romaine (talk) 15:12, 14 May 2015 (UTC)
Delete these relations, as they are trying to capture the subclass of the topic of the category and not the category itself. As regards both types of categorization, there have been several recently rejected properties for capturing the "category" relationship. So it's correct simply to delete these claims. @Romaine: Wikidata:Property proposal/Archive/30#Parent category and Wikidata:Property proposal/Archive/30#category should make it pretty clear that these relationships aren't desired here. --Izno (talk) 14:07, 18 May 2015 (UTC)
@Izno: Sorry, but or you do not understand the relationship I try to describe, or you just make a false comparison. I have seen both discussions (which I agree with) and still these are different from this situation. So no, they do not make it pretty clear, those handle a different situation. And there is a relationship between the two items, that is something you ignore completely with pointing to a different discussion. So it is NOT correct to simply delete these claims. If you think this should be handled, come up with a solution to solve this without just a silly deleting. Romaine (talk) 16:33, 18 May 2015 (UTC)

Menu drop-down broken?

Hi, on item pages I no longer see the drop down option "More", with the menu selections "Merge" and "Move". Is there something wrong with the java script tools? Thx. Jane023 (talk) 10:29, 17 May 2015 (UTC)

The tool for advanced label support has been missing for some time as well... Sadly... It means that I have not fixed many labels I know to be wrong. GerardM (talk) 12:28, 17 May 2015 (UTC)
Solved! Thanks to whoever fixed it. Jane023 (talk) 07:33, 18 May 2015 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #158

next 2 rounds of arbitrary access coming up

Hey folks :)

The rollout of arbitrary access on Dutch Wikipedia and French Wikisource seems to be going well so we're going to continue the rollout. The next projects will be:

  • 18. May: Farsi Wikipedia, English Wikivoyage, Hebrew Wikipedia
  • 1. June: Italian Wikipedia, all remaining Wikisource

Cheers --Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) (talk) 15:20, 13 May 2015 (UTC)

Hey folks :)
Next round has been done now.
I have one request: Please do NOT go to those projects and try out arbitrary access in their articles. Leave that to the local communities. We want more projects to make use of Wikidata and not be annoyed by random people coming to their projects and messing up their articles.
Cheers --Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) (talk) 10:19, 19 May 2015 (UTC)

what about entries in Freebase?

Once upon a time (back in 2007...) I added an entry about me in Freebase (https://www.freebase.com/m/02k_r3d). I never updated it, though, so it is desperately inaccurate: just to say, I actually am an author, since I published four books: but none of them is present in the entry. What will happen now that their database will be imported to Wikidata? Of course I don't care too much that the entry must be kept: but if this was the case I'd like to update it... --.mau. (talk) 13:13, 15 May 2015 (UTC)

As fare as i know this entry will die with Freebase. Freebase items will not be imported into Wikidata. The only item connected with you is the Wikinews article Q17963958 ("Wiki@Home intervista ..."). --Kolja21 (talk) 16:36, 15 May 2015 (UTC)
Thanks. I read something about importation of data from Freebase (and related concerns about who used Freebase for advertising), so I was a bit puzzled. --.mau. (talk) 05:07, 19 May 2015 (UTC)
Yes, some data will be imported from Freebase but only if the item already exists in Wikidata. --Kolja21 (talk) 12:49, 19 May 2015 (UTC)

Time for local CheckUsers?

Hi all, with an increase in sockpuppets recently, as well as the ever-present need to check spambots, I think that now would be a good time for Wikidata to get some local CheckUsers. Most of the stewards who do checks are admins here and thus can't do checks here, and the response time from other stewards is rather slow. What do you all think about it? Ajraddatz (talk) 23:25, 15 May 2015 (UTC)

It would probably be used more than OS, at least. --Rschen7754 01:00, 16 May 2015 (UTC)
Good idea. --AmaryllisGardener talk 01:30, 16 May 2015 (UTC)
I guess a few more thoughts on this: I've had concerns about relegating the use of CU on this wiki to the stewards (which I won't go into here), and I believe that it would be in our best interests to handle this by ourselves. The other question is if there are candidates who would be able to get 25 votes and the right percentage (I forget what it is locally) within a 2 week period. I do have concerns about people not involved in the community opposing because they don't like how CU is used on enwiki etc., and feel that a canvassing or minimum tenure/number of edits guideline may need to be considered beforehand. Also, if these candidates are oversighters, would they be resigning their OS rights (and would we have to get more oversighters), or would they keep them?
I guess I'll be transparent and say that if I was asked if I was running today, I would probably decline; I'm enjoying the peace and quiet after stepping down from being a steward, and life is busy right now, though I might reconsider in the future. I'm also not very active as an oversighter either, but that's because the requests come in when I am at work and unable to respond to them. I'm available to respond to requests evenings and weekends in the US, but unfortunately there's not many requests then. But I'm still monitoring the OS logs, if that helps. --Rschen7754 02:10, 16 May 2015 (UTC)
I have no intention of running either, so no concerns (for now) with OS candidates. I would like to see, as part of this discussion, if anyone involved in CheckUser-y areas here would be interested in running. We should probably elect 3-5 IMO Ajraddatz (talk) 02:15, 16 May 2015 (UTC)
I support this proposal. I think it's time Wikidata has its own CUs. But the major question is, if the community wants it, who should run it? Jianhui67 talkcontribs 07:02, 16 May 2015 (UTC)
Isn't that the easiest question? At least those two users, who can get a minimum of 75%/25 support-votes. The easiest way to find one is probably to look for well-known admins with a good reputation. I am not saying that they have to be admins, but I think it is easier to find a successfull candidate among them. -- Innocent bystander (talk) 09:56, 16 May 2015 (UTC)
If any prospective candidates want to drop me an email and ask about the role or suitability, I would be happy to answer questions. --Rschen7754 15:47, 16 May 2015 (UTC)
Hi all, I don't fit the active admin envisioned above, but if we need people I am willing to help. I am not experienced as a checkuser, never had the need, but I can learn. I'm an admin and a steward so I hope I can be trusted. Active on a daily basis (always on a couple of projects if not Wikidata) and am able to respond timely to any request. Your thoughts on this are very welcome Rschen7754. All the best, Taketa (talk) 17:16, 16 May 2015 (UTC)
I'd like to go with some of the very active users here, especially in counter-vandalism. I would be glad to help train new checkusers, so experience isn't a big issue. I would personally like to see @Jasper Deng:, @Ymblanter: and @Jared Preston: consider applying. Ajraddatz (talk) 17:21, 16 May 2015 (UTC)
If there are enough people who are highly active I won't apply :). Consider me a backup if you can't get the team together. Cheers, Taketa (talk) 17:23, 16 May 2015 (UTC)
Two respected admins that have been here forever it seems, and an admin who is newer, but is active and certainly knows what he's doing. I'd support those three. --AmaryllisGardener talk 17:31, 16 May 2015 (UTC)
I'm personally okay with Ymblanter being both a CU and bureaucrat, but I suspect that others might not. --Rschen7754 17:33, 16 May 2015 (UTC)
Thanks all for support but I would be absolutely helpless as a CU since I do not know how to block a range, not even speaking about more advanced issues. If we decide to have CUs, I am not going to run, I am pretty happy in my role as admin and crat here.--Ymblanter (talk) 17:42, 16 May 2015 (UTC)
So is it time to open up to candidates? --George (Talk · Contribs · CentralAuth · Log) 05:54, 17 May 2015 (UTC)
I'd like to see if any more people are interested first, and get a feel for whether or not they would be widely supported. I don't want a repeat of the RfOS, when we had a bunch of them at the start but only one elected due to the 25 rule. Ajraddatz (talk) 06:00, 17 May 2015 (UTC)

────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────

@Ajraddatz, Ymblanter, Caliburn, AmaryllisGardener, Rschen7754: I wouldn't have any problem with the role, I'd be happy to deliver the information if required, but like Ymblanter, I don't have a clue on how to block IP ranges. I expect Rschen7754 wouldn't mind lending me a word or two of advice should we decide to go so far. Whether I am nominated or not, I think it's essential to the integrity of the project that we can conduct our own CU checks. I think we're pretty much all agreed on that note. Jared Preston (talk) 15:23, 17 May 2015 (UTC)
I am more than willing to run, as I think I have the necessary technical expertise (I would think that my knowledge of IPv6 ranges is especially useful), as long as the resultant CheckUser team handles as many checks as the stewards currently do, so that overall productivity isn't lost.--Jasper Deng (talk) 16:52, 17 May 2015 (UTC)
In my opinion, local CUs would rather be a step back for Wikidata than a step forward, considering what kind of CU requests we do get. We do not have the resources to deal with spambot checks as effectively as stewards may do who run all the cross-wiki checks, anyway. My feeling is we did not have more than 10 occasions where a non-spambot check has been necessary in over 3 years of Wikidata. This makes at max. 1 check of that non-spambot nature every 3-4 months, and this is already calculated very "optimistically". I pretty much disagree with Jared Preston's note on own CU checks are being necessary for our integrity, not for nothing we decided to let stewards continue performing spambot checks (of cross-wiki nature, which is usually the case) even if local CheckUsers would have been appointed (cf. Wikidata:Checkuser policy#Stewards), and for the rest we just have too little need to warrant own local checkusers as well as the extra burden for stewards performing cross-wiki checks, having to notify the likely small local team each time they do anything here. Vogone (talk) 19:52, 17 May 2015 (UTC)
Considering the metawiki search, it's rather one non-spambot check every 6-8 months than every 3-4 months even, which makes Ajraddatz's claim of recent "increase in sockpuppets" even more irreal. Vogone (talk) 20:00, 17 May 2015 (UTC)
I very strongly disagree. Let's look at how stewards have handled our CU requests:
m:Steward_requests/Checkuser#FreightXPress.40wikidata - Mardetanha seems to think that it is okay to publicly link an account to an IP address on a public page on Meta. In this case, it was okay, because the user self-disclosed their IP address when they created the account IP-80.134.90.212 (talkcontribslogs). The problem is, Mardetanha did not realize that this was the name of an account until after the disclosure was made.
m:Steward_requests/Checkuser/2013-12#Sanela.40wikidatawiki - stewards refused to disclose the user running unapproved bots on multiple accounts after being blocked multiple times, preventing us from enforcing our policy on multiple accounts. We even had oversighters by then, who could have handled more sensitive cases, and we were still not told who was running these sock accounts. Even after a year as a steward, I still cannot think of how publicly linking accounts would violate the privacy policy.
And as a counterpoint to the argument above, so that may be only 7-8 requests, but that means that stewards messed up 25% of them.
Combined with significant misgivings with some of the more active stewards (one of the reasons that I resigned a few months ago), I believe it would be in our better interests to elect local CUs. And much of Vogone's objections would be addressed if one of "our" stewards was a CU; they would be motivated to do the checking because this is their homewiki, and they could globally lock and block. --Rschen7754 20:07, 17 May 2015 (UTC)
  Question So we had two CU cases to run in the past? --Succu (talk) 21:47, 17 May 2015 (UTC)
More than that: about 7-8 public requests and other checks done by stewards for spambots or cross-wiki abusers. --Rschen7754 22:51, 17 May 2015 (UTC)
@Vogone: Hence why I said that I'd want our CU's to have the capacity to do that. I have no reason to believe that they wouldn't, given that we also have a number of steward admins here who perform checks on other wikis, but can't because they're local admins here, and because I think we have a set of capable candidates. The amount of spambots we get is now low enough such that I rarely see checks being performed here for spambots as well.--Jasper Deng (talk) 20:29, 17 May 2015 (UTC)
So when it comes down to the workload, how many cases of checkuser are there in a month or a year? I believe it would be of benefit, if there is some cross-wiki platform where positive results of all wikis are posted, so the checkusers or stewards might detect disruptive editing on a cross-wiki base. Surely there should be a routine cross-wiki check for all positive results no matter in what project the spammbot was active. The risk for the bot owner is low, so it is essentially that all edits are found quickly and appropriate response can be taken. Is there a technical possibility to redirect the edits of detected spambots to a mirrorsite instead of blocking the bot? So the spambot might do its work undisturbed on sandbox items on a mirror without harming anything. The edit of a detected bot are no threat and can be rollbacked anytime, the edits of undetected bots are more threatening. --Giftzwerg 88 (talk) 21:42, 18 May 2015 (UTC)
@Giftzwerg 88: CheckUsers have access to their own wiki but unless the case is a particularly bad one, I don't think IPs/results are stored there. They also have access to their own IRC channel and mailing list which they use for cross-wiki coordination, such as the case of cross-wiki spambots. As for redirecting edits, that would be purely a waste of time; the spam would have to be cleaned up and deleted anyways, and it is generally impossible to tell whether a given edit is spam or not using purely a technical filter; the abuse filters are not perfect for a reason. There isn't a reason to keep spam once discovered, either.--Jasper Deng (talk) 23:29, 18 May 2015 (UTC)
It would also quickly become a game of cat and mouse. Speaking from my experience as a steward: there is no true cross-wiki CheckUser functionality, though stewards have found a few ways to mitigate this which I won't go into. Usually results go to checkuser-l if cross-wiki action is needed, and they get stored on the wiki only in the case of repeated abusers where the data will likely be needed after it is no longer available using the CU function (to protect privacy, CU data is erased after it is a few months old). However, spambot IPs and accounts regularly go to checkuser-l since it affects all wikis, and because steward action is usually needed to lock accounts and globally block IPs. More spambot and cross-wiki checks would be run here if we had local CUs, simply because stewards don't have the time to run checks on every spambot or cross-wiki LTA that touches every wiki without local CUs (over 700). --Rschen7754 01:05, 19 May 2015 (UTC)
So local checkusers are dependent of the help of stewards if it comes to cross-wiki spam? It looks like this information is exchanged based on personal contacts between stewards and checkusers of different projects, which I appreciate. But I think of a more official way to communicate this informations, a kind of standard procedure to give some alert or hints to watch certain accounts or IP-adresses for their activities and check them. If there is reasonable cause for local checkuse, the same cause applies to checkuse on all other projects and there is no reason why a user with many sockpuppets won´t do the same on other projects. The cause is approved each time a local checkuser has the abuse documented on a local project. We must think in a more global way, we are talking about big data and about a multi language project, so we need a secured conection to all projects.--Giftzwerg 88 (talk) 10:26, 19 May 2015 (UTC)
@Giftzwerg 88: While these are helpful thoughts, they aren't really relevant to local CheckUsers; it's for privacy reasons that non-stewards can only have local CheckUser access, and although cross-wiki coordination is important, the vast majority of sockpuppetry cases are local (not necessarily here but a general global observation). Not every wiki can have CheckUsers because you need a sufficiently large community to vet candidates and create a CheckUser policy. To be clear, also, cross-wiki contacts between CheckUsers are not personal, they are official communication channels explicitly for the purpose of cross-wiki coordination. In short, the sharing of IP data is only done when needed. Rest assured though that CheckUsers know what are and aren't cross-wiki cases and deal with the cross-wiki cases accordingly.--Jasper Deng (talk) 16:18, 19 May 2015 (UTC)

Property for "commander"/"commanded by"/"command of"

Need a property to link Detlev Krankenhagen (Q4237593) to U-549 (Q563394). Anyone know of an existing one? --Izno (talk) 15:58, 19 May 2015 (UTC)

Izno: You could use commander of (DEPRECATED) (P598). — Ayack (talk) 16:42, 20 May 2015 (UTC)
Thanks. --Izno (talk) 19:12, 20 May 2015 (UTC)

Merge problems

Can someone merge en:Category:Federico Fellini (Q16812095) with de:Kategorie:Federico Fellini (Q9156497) ? 88.70.25.119 22:56, 19 May 2015 (UTC)

  Merged --Pasleim (talk) 22:58, 19 May 2015 (UTC)

this diff just popped up a claim

.

This is a big problem to me, as I don't know what this means and the of qualifier is highly unspecified. We should either precise the scope and the intend uses of it or find a better solution. (@Emw, X meta, zolo: Pinging probably interested wikidatans.

For example, I'd write this as

, which is a solution with less statements and a more precise meaning. Clearly a music band has musician members, for sure. TomT0m (talk) 09:50, 20 May 2015 (UTC)

I agree that "of" does not seem to be a very clear property in general, and that it should not be applied here in particular. However,

musician is classified as a profession, not as a subclass of humans, and don't think a group of humans should be Composed of Search musicians. I would rather use occupation (P106) either as a standalone statement or as a qualifier "instance of group of humans". --Zolo (talk) 09:59, 20 May 2015 (UTC)

@Zolo: By definition, profession (Q28640)      is an activity that someone does for money. So it's not a really good solution to say every music band earns money for it, it's pretty false in the general case. I prefer the more less specific field of work (P101)   property. Qualifying instance of seems pretty weird and not really well specified to me. Formally maybe it could be used to precise some parameters of a metaclass, like template (Q1411845)      ? Like a group of things could be used as a metaclass (Q19478619)      in Protégé (Q2066865)      (cf. la section sur Protégé dans l'article Wikipédia), and the of qualifier used to instanciate the things parameter ? I'll ping maybe @Denny, Markus Krötzsch: on this :) TomT0m (talk) 10:45, 20 May 2015 (UTC)
@TomT0m: The French label of occupation (P106) is inconsistent with other languages. The subject item of occupation (P106) is occupation (Q13516667) and not profession (Q28640) so we may have to change the French label from profession to occupation --Pasleim (talk) 12:12, 20 May 2015 (UTC)
@Pasleim: Yet another use of of : . I'd prefer an instance of social sciences concept, but we need a clarification on concept anyway. Help:Classification could help, but I'm not sure how. Clearly when I make a hat, it's an event who can be classified in the hatmaking class of events. That someone often makes hat is possible using the occupation property for sure to link the person to those kind of classes. I think then that of course
⟨ hatmaking ⟩ instance of (P31)   ⟨ occupation ⟩
makes sense. I'm not sure how the concept concept fits here. I would be happy with a metaclass social science class with a kind of statement
⟨ social science class ⟩ classes used by Search ⟨ social sciences ⟩
and
⟨ social science class ⟩ subclass of (P279)   ⟨ social science class ⟩
. TomT0m (talk) 12:55, 20 May 2015 (UTC)
I forgot
⟨ occupation ⟩ subclass of (P279)   ⟨ social science class ⟩
. This would make occupations a subset of all the classes used by social sciences. TomT0m (talk) 12:58, 20 May 2015 (UTC)

I think the example looks rather understandable to me. I wonder if it works in other languages, too. That would be for me the much more important measure whether it makes sense or not. Another important measure are the use cases for such a statement in the other Wikimedia projects. That's what we should be measuring against. Considerations about Metaclasses, Protege, Reasoning and Class subsumption are for me secondary concerns, to be honest. --Denny (talk) 16:28, 20 May 2015 (UTC)

@Denny: That it make sense in natural language is indeed a nice feature, but it's like it is more a gut oriented usecase than a structured one. This implies the problems with several ways to say one thing, language interpretation dependancies, misunderstanding and so on, cultural differences problems, ... . As far as I'm concerned, this defeats a lot of the purposes of structuring datas and mimics a lot of problems with natural languages. The problem here is mainly that we have a multi purpose qualifier with no idea on how it is used by consumer, how it can be used to model things and a really poor documentation on the talkpage. As far as I can tell, it usually used to say something similar that the subclass statements says, I do not always see the added value. TomT0m (talk) 16:41, 20 May 2015 (UTC)
@TomT0m:, as I said, if it works in the other languages too then I assume it is not a natural language thing. Natural languages have so few universals that I would be very much surprised if we stumbled upon one here. So, if it works not only in English and German and related languages, but also in Chinese, Turkic, Arabic, etc., then I am inclined to say that the property has some reasonable conceptual interpretation. --Denny (talk) 16:58, 20 May 2015 (UTC)
P.S.: Actually, thinking about my limited understanding of Turkic languages, I would be rather surprised if it worked there, but I would like to want a more advanced speaker to weigh in. --Denny (talk) 17:00, 20 May 2015 (UTC)
I'm actually trying to find a good interpretation :). Not convinced yet there is some (that is not redundant), for example in the two examples I provided it seems that there is a lot of work to do to know, for example if the qualifier makes the members of the bands musicians, if the group has musician as an occupation ... whether in the second it seems pretty clear that a concept has a domain of relevance. In one case it's used on an instance of statement, in the second it's used on a subclass of statement. Clearly instance of and subclass of have a lot of literature written on them ... but with this qualifier it is a whole new world. TomT0m (talk) 17:46, 20 May 2015 (UTC)

Full names and non-country nationalities

I've been participating off-and-on for a while, and there are two things that I'm not too sure about when I edit items about people and they keep coming up.

First, what do we do with full names? Many people go by shorter variations of their official birth name, including both people who sometimes include their initials or middle names and individuals with multiple last names (as in Spanish and Portuguese naming customs, where usually only one is needed for day-to-day life). Do they all get put in aliases? This seems like it would not scale very well, considering most languages would have the same value but we have to add them separately for each. Part of me has always wanted to use birth name (P1477), but that's typically use for name changes, not for people who just have a longer "official" name. Do we have an existing procedure for this?

Second, how do we handle non-country nationalities, like Galician, Catalan, Scottish, English, etc.? This goes for both in the item description and statements. I typically use the more specific nationality as an item descriptor (e.g., Scottish politician, Catalan businessman), but then put the actual country in the statement country of citizenship (P27). I don't see any places where we could add "Catalunya" or "Scotland" in the actual statements list for that item, but it feels weird to leave it out, especially when a few Wikipedians actually put that information in the "nationality" spot of infoboxes.

How do other users typically handle these? Cbrown1023 talk 18:18, 20 May 2015 (UTC)

"Nationality" is a very ambiguous concept. To add where a person was born, use place of birth (P19). To add their ethnicity, use ethnic group (P172). To add where they have lived, use residence (P551), preferably with start time (P580)/end time (P582). To add what country or region they've been a politician of, add it to the item about their positions. Is there any other data that determines what nationality a person is? --Yair rand (talk) 20:40, 20 May 2015 (UTC)
I'm mostly referring to autonomous regions like Catalonia (Q5705) and Scotland (Q22) which are technically part of a larger country, but have some degree of autonomy and regional identification. (Those don't really seem the same as an ethnic group (P172) to me, but others may disagree.) There is no Scottish or Catalan passports, but most people identify as being from those regions rather than the broader countries like United Kingdom (Q145) or Spain (Q29). Look at w:ca:Artur Mas i Gavarró, for example, the nationality is indicated as "Catalan" rather than "Spanish". If we pulled Wikidata information for infoboxes on cawiki, we would lose that distinction.
On a similar note, how do we handle country of citizenship (P27) for British citizens? Should it be the broader United Kingdom (Q145) or something more specific like England (Q21), Scotland (Q22), or Wales (Q25)? Technically the latter options are more specific and are still countries, but "citizenship" applies more to the United Kingdom than its constituent countries. Cbrown1023 talk 15:07, 21 May 2015 (UTC)
What determines whether a person is of Scottish or Catalan nationality? Just being born there? Ancestry? Self-identification? Is there anything that can clearly show that a person is of a particular non-country nationality, or are the infoboxes just populated by editorial decisions based on a variety of factors?
Re country of citizenship (P27), presumably United Kingdom (Q145), unless there actually is a formal citizenship for UK constituent countries. --Yair rand (talk) 17:52, 21 May 2015 (UTC)
Re aliases: All used versions of an individual's name should be aliases, IMO. That's what aliases are for: a list of anything that someone would reasonably use to refer to the subject. (Sorry if I've misunderstood the question.) --Yair rand (talk) 20:44, 20 May 2015 (UTC)
birth name (P1477) is the correct property for the full name (at birth). To make it searchable, the same would need to be added as alias. --- Jura 04:45, 21 May 2015 (UTC)
Thanks to both you, that's mostly in line with what I typically do. Even though birth name (P1477) says it's only supposed to be used when the birth name is different (i.e., when there was a name change), I sometimes ignore that. Wikidata should really show the birth name results in search results too though, not just aliases. Cbrown1023 talk 15:07, 21 May 2015 (UTC)

put the same refference to multiple properties at once

Hello. Is there a way to put the same refference to multiple properties at once? For example in Q17442744 I want to put the same reference for all teams in p:P710 at once. Xaris333 (talk) 22:29, 20 May 2015 (UTC)

Not yet. The developers are working on it: phab:T76233. --Yair rand (talk) 22:55, 20 May 2015 (UTC)
@Xaris333: you can use described by source (P1343) and describe your source with authors/urls/pages once, then only specify stated in (P248) as source for all entity properties. Another option is to create separate Wikidata Item for your source, put all your source properties into this new item, and make reference to this item as value of stated in (P248) for statements in original item. -- VlSergey (трёп) 09:29, 21 May 2015 (UTC)
@Vlsergey: Why do you use described by source (P1343) if there is a reference section ? Use the reference section of the declaration and point to the item containing the data of the source using stated in (P248) and then add the specific data like page under the reference section. Snipre (talk) 12:26, 21 May 2015 (UTC)
@Snipre: sometimes it is more convenient. have a look at Arthur Conan Doyle (Q35610) for example. There are duplicate sources at date of birth (P569) and date of death (P570), but there are only a "reference" mention of those sources using stated in (P248). Full "addresses" (title, page, url) of those sources are placed in described by source (P1343) value. We will describe those sources in described by source (P1343) anyway (like "Literature" part of Wikipedia article), so why not to use it? Thus we removing duplication and we don't need to introduce new wikidata items. Well, it works nicely (only?) when encyclopedic articles is used as a source, because single item is described in encyclopedia once. For more complicated cases like article in the book or magazine, it's better to create separate item and link to it using stated in (P248) in reference, as you (and me -- second option in my message above) described. -- VlSergey (gab) 12:44, 21 May 2015 (UTC)
@Xaris333: Please have a look at Help:Sources and if you have other questions please use the talk page. Snipre (talk) 12:26, 21 May 2015 (UTC)

Constraint Irreflexive

I propose a new Template:Constraint "Irreflexive". Applies to properties that can't connect an item to itself.

Eg it would be very useful for A different from (P1889) B: such claim is recorded when A and B are often confused, so I DO get confused when entering it for A, and have made the mistake of picking up A.

Could also be useful for familial relations.

--Vladimir Alexiev (talk) 07:54, 21 May 2015 (UTC)

@Vladimir Alexiev: All properties (whether actually irreflexive or not) are considered irreflexive in constraint violations report. See Wikidata:Database reports/Constraint violations/P17#"Self link" violations (although it is not real violations). In addition, there're Special:AbuseFilter/49 plus self-referencing tag.--GZWDer (talk) 09:44, 21 May 2015 (UTC)

Al Rayyan: municipality AND town in Qatar, three different data items here, Persian language difficulty

Hallo, many language versions of WP do not differentiate the municipality of Al Rayyan from the town of the same name. Until now, Wikidata has had three different items for this disentangled set:

  1. Q311272 which I have used for all articles that are concerned with the municipality only
  2. Q18576873 which I have used for all articles that are concerned with the town only
  3. Q11686604 which used to contain links to the Polish and the Macedonian language versions of articles for the municipality (I have moved those to item no. 1).

Now, I think I have identified the articles (in Latin and Cyrillic alphabets which I can read) for either item correctly but I am unsure about the articles in arabic languages. Especially, the items in Persian are a riddle to me:

Q311272 links to the Persian Wikipedia article fa:الریان and to the Persian Wikivoyage article voy:fa:الریان, Q11686604 links to the Persian Wikipedia article fa:ریان and to the Persian Wikivoyage article voy:fa:الریان (استان). I have no idea what either of them is concerned with.

Could anyone please help me disentangle these? Or could you direct me to a more specific help desk? Thanks, --Andropov (talk) 13:43, 21 May 2015 (UTC)

done Michiel1972 (talk) 14:27, 21 May 2015 (UTC)
Thank you! --Andropov (talk) 14:29, 21 May 2015 (UTC)

Using Wikidata on small wikis

So, I was thinking that we could use start using Wikidata (besides a few isolated uses) in small wikis (with {{#property:P#}}), for things starting with something like the population and head of government/state of countries. For example, by making this edit (except with wikilinks around it). With help, we could make sure all Wikidata items about countries could be manually verified to have the correct and up to date population and head of state/goverment properties, with the correct rank of course. Then we could make that edit to all of the country articles on scowiki (and other small wikis where someone involved with this project would also be an active editor at). We also have to make sure that the items on the politicians have labels, which might make population listings easier, but the problem with the populations is that you couldn't list a date or reference on the wiki. Thoughts or volunteers? --AmaryllisGardener talk 01:58, 19 May 2015 (UTC)

I'm not sure of the schedule, but aren't we only a couple of months away from having arbitrary access on the rest of the Wikipedias? If I understand correctly, after that's available even automatically showing sources and dates would be possible. I recommend waiting and then making a bunch of changes to the infobox templates so that the pages don't need to be edited manually. --Yair rand (talk) 02:47, 19 May 2015 (UTC)
Just be careful - a few years ago ocwiki tried this but in a horrible implementation (bot-created stubs populated with magic infoboxes that broke). [4] is the result. --Rschen7754 03:01, 19 May 2015 (UTC)
@Rschen7754: That does look like something we'd have to be careful not to do, but it looks like they tried to start out with too much. @Yair rand: Well, it can wait a while. --AmaryllisGardener talk 03:09, 19 May 2015 (UTC)
I've also followed the oc experiment. Like Rschen7754 said it's a total mess with empty templates (oc:Modèl:Infobox) or templates that have been changed so often that it's hard to understand how they are linked with each other (oc:Modèl:Debuta Infobox V2). It would be good to start an initiative to clean up the mess and then we see what is the best way Wikidata can help (or destruct) small Wikis. --Kolja21 (talk) 13:00, 19 May 2015 (UTC)
BTW: Is there an admin that can help to delete the pages marked for deletion? oc:Categoria:Wikipèdia:Supression has more than 800 entries. --Kolja21 (talk) 13:15, 19 May 2015 (UTC)
Dropped a request at m:SRM, since I suspect that it may be too much for the 2 active admins. --Rschen7754 13:33, 19 May 2015 (UTC)
I am in pronciple positive but we also need to think about how we guarantee that Wikidata items used across several hundred projects are vandalism-free. I have a dozen of country entries on my watchlist, and they get vandalized on a regular basis.--Ymblanter (talk) 15:53, 19 May 2015 (UTC)
Yeah, vandalism's a problem. I was thinking that those involved in this project could watch a dozen or two country items. That way, we could make sure that any vandalism is reverted. BTW, for heads of state/government, to list that using Wikidata is very simple, and doesn't require dates or refs, just the name. --AmaryllisGardener talk 16:53, 19 May 2015 (UTC)
RE: "for heads of state/government ... is very simple" Maybe it is simple, but to be useful, you sometimes need the title of the person(s). Andorra have two heads of states, with two different titles AFIK. And in the Commonwelth there is both a Governor and a Queen. And the city of Stockholm have 12 mayors, each with a very specific title. -- Innocent bystander (talk) 10:10, 20 May 2015 (UTC)
Isn't this pretty much the same as I did two years ago on ru-wiki? See here for the examples. Same story on es-wiki on tennis related stuff. Edoderoo (talk) 12:16, 21 May 2015 (UTC)
@Edoderoo: Yes. Did your thing work? --AmaryllisGardener talk 17:25, 21 May 2015 (UTC)
Sure, on quite some wiki's that was implemented in the corresponding tennis infobox. Some Wiki's reverted due to several known or unknown reasons. The German wiki because the wikidata entry uses a dash instead of a semi-colon in the statistic numbers, the Dutch because they don't want to use Wikidata at all, the others I don't remember or just don't know. In the mean time those tennis statistics seem to be pretty well updated accross the communities, and someone even tried to get allowance to update part of it by an automated bot, but this gave issues with database rights. Still, for me it's a good show case of how Wikidata can be used to keep often changed data up to date on several wiki's. Some of the smaller wiki's can keep their tennis statistics pretty much updated without extra (or any) effort from their own community, as they benefit from the changes done by the larger foreign communities. Edoderoo (talk) 18:59, 21 May 2015 (UTC)
I might try changing the tennis infoboxes on scowiki, and if anyone complains (which is very unlikely, the whole community's me and two other admins) I can revert. I'll switch the country article's infoboxes individually (as in article by article like this, not changing all articles at the same time by changing the infobox) to insure that it's good. I'll hold off with changing the country infobox for a while. Thanks for the input everyone! :) --AmaryllisGardener talk 19:15, 21 May 2015 (UTC)

Wikidata, cycling and list of participants

Bonjour à tous. Je travaille sur la version francophone de Wikipédia, mais de manière plus importante à l'illustration du cyclisme (exemple). Entre deux reportages sur le terrain, je prépare la transition vers Wikidata, un projet qui avance petit à petit, mais qui progresse.
Aujourd'hui, ma question va porter sur les équipes et les coureurs participant à une course cycliste, au travers de l'article Grand Prix de Denain 2015 comme exemple. Comment faire (simple) avec Wikidata pour entrer une liste d'équipes, tout en sachant qu'il faut ensuite aller rechercher leur code UCI en trois lettre et leur pays de provenance, et qu'elles ont différentes places dans le tableau selon leur catégorie (UCI WorldTeams, Équipes continentales professionnelles, Équipes continentales...) ? Selon moi, un élément participating teams pourrait être créé. Mais ces mêmes équipes sont reprises dans la liste des partants, où je dois associer à un coureur son numéro de dossart et sa place, voire éventuellement un abandon au cours d'une étape (lorsqu'il s'agit d'une course à étapes comme le Tour de France ; Liste des coureurs du Tour de France 2014). Il faut également mentionner les directeurs sportifs, voire les maillots spécifiques que peuvent revêtir les coureurs. Tout ceci est encore assez compliqué pour moi. je souhaiterais quelque chose de simple à remplir, ce qui permettrait à d'autres contributeurs de générer les listes des partants, et d'effectuer sans trop de mal de nombreuses traductions. Cordialement, JGHJ.

[Google Translate] Hello everyone. I work on the French version of Wikipedia, but more importantly the cycling illustration (example). Between two stories from the field, I prepare the transition to Wikidata, a project advancing gradually, but progress.
Now my question is about the teams and riders participating in a bicycle race, through article Grand Prix de Denain 2015 as an example. How (simple) with Wikidata to enter a list of teams while knowing that they must then go seek their three letter code UCI and their country of origin, and have different places in the table according to their category (UCI WorldTeams, Professional Continental Teams, Continental Teams ...)? I think something participante teams could be created. But these same teams are included in the list of starters, where I have to associate with a runner dossart its number and its place, or possibly a discontinuation during a step (in the case of a stage race like the Tour de France; Liste des coureurs du Tour de France 2014). Mention must also be the team managers or specific jerseys that can take the riders. All this is further complicated enough for me. I would like something simple to fill, which would allow other contributors to generate the lists of participants, and perform without too much difficulty many translations. Sincerely, Jérémy-Günther-Heinz Jähnick (talk) 12:35, 19 May 2015 (UTC)

Teams shouldn't be used in definition of the participants list of a competition but only individual participants. Teams can be deduce from the "CV" of each runner defined in his item. Mainly because teams have often some substitutes which don't take part to the competition. If I know that a runner took part to a competition and at the same time I know he is part of a team at that moment of his career, I can deduce that the team took part to that competition. Snipre (talk) 14:39, 19 May 2015 (UTC)
Oui, je le savais déjà qu'il allait être possible de déduire les équipes à partir des coureurs (tout comme leur nationalité), mais j'ai besoin que Wikidata fasse la différence suivant les compétitions qui alignent 6, 7, 8, 9 voire 10 coureurs sur une course pour que le tableau tel que présenté dans mon exemple soit correctement rempli, tout en sachant qu'il arrive qu'il y ait des trous dans les effectifs présentés. Et enfin, pour aller plus loin, je souhaite que le nom de l'équipe pointe vers sa saison 2015, et qu'il y a ce problème récurrent que les équipes changent régulièrement de nom au fil des saisons. Bref, c'est quelque chose de plus complexe qu'il n'y paraît, d'autant plus que je souhaiterais que tout soit ensuite uniformiser sur les différentes Wikipédia puisque je souhaite pouvoir potentiellement créer des articles de courses dans une vingtaine de langues. Je vais te contacter pour d'autres questions et des points précis. Jérémy-Günther-Heinz Jähnick (talk) 15:51, 19 May 2015 (UTC)
Pas compris ton problème d'équipe avec 6, 7, 8, 9 voire 10 coureurs: c'est la combinaison entre le fait que qu'il existe un lien entre tous les coureurs qui ont participé à une course et le lien entre une équipe et un coureur à un moment précis qui te permet de construire l'équipe qui a participé à une course. Ensuite, le problème de nome est simple: il suffit d'utiliser la propriété "nom officiel" qui doit être définit pour un intervale de temps donné et récupérer le nom correspondant à la date de la compétition. Vu la complexité du sujet, il faudra envisager de faire l'extraction de données hors ligne et de sauver les données en dur dans les pages d'articles et non par avoir un système de connexion à WD à chaque ouverture de page. Snipre (talk) 17:35, 19 May 2015 (UTC)
Conflit d'édition @Jérémy-Günther-Heinz Jähnick: Utilises des qualificateurs (je bosse sur les courses de chiens de traîneau, et j'ai la même question compelxe de gestion des participants à gérer). Moi par exemple j'utilise participant (P710) pour les individus et en qualificateur de P710 sport number (P1618), ranking (P1352), point in time (P585) (mais pas trop utilisable pour le cyclisme où tout le monde arrive le même jour). Pour les abandons j'utilise significant event (P793) avec scratched (Q18595374), withdrawal (Q18609099) ou disqualification (Q18595902) (les 3 possibilités dans ce sport) et j'ajoute alors location (P276) avec le checkpoint (possible d'indiquer l'étape d'abandon à la place puisque je crois qu'il y a un item par étape sur WD pour le Tour). Tu peux sans doute ajouter en qualificateur member of (P463) avec l'item de l'équipe… Concernant le nombre de membres dans l'équipe, je n'ai pas actuellement de solution, vu que la situation n'est pas non plus rélgée pour les chiens de traîneau. Voir 2015 Iditarod (Q19455277) pour un exemple et Wikidata:WikiProject Sled dog racing/Todo pour ma méthode. En espérant avoir aidé… --Harmonia Amanda (talk) 17:46, 19 May 2015 (UTC)
@Harmonia Amanda: merci pour ta réponse, je vois que tu as le même problème que moi concernant la demande de création de propriété où des contributeurs cherchent à faire des économies et à en créer le moins possible au lieu d'écouter ce que demande le proposant, tout en sachant que chaque sport a bel et bien ses spécificités. Grâce à toi, je sais maintenant comment indiquer les abandons et autres.
@Snipre: : ça reste encore trop compliqué pour des contributeurs lambda. Il me faudrait la possibilité d'avoir des qualificatif de qualificatifs.
participant (P710) => Topsport Vlaanderen-Baloise 2015 (Q18746658), avec en qualificatif le listage de six à dix coureurs, et ces coureurs là se verraient qualifier d'un numéro de dossard, et au fil de la course d'abandons, puis de places (Harmonia Amanda : toutes les courses par étapes auront un élément par étape, même les moins importantes, vu qu'ils gèrent également autre chose). Je pense même qu'en qualificatif des équipes on devrait avoir d'abord le numéro de dossart, puis le coureur, et enfin sa place ou son abandon, parce qu'il arrive parfois comme à ma course de dimanche que l'équipe ne vienne pas au dernier moment, et que les dossarts lui aient déjà été réservés. À mon sans, il ne faut pas se contenter d'un système unique pour tous les sports, mais bien tenir compte des spécificités. Jérémy-Günther-Heinz Jähnick (talk) 07:35, 20 May 2015 (UTC)
=> autre équipe, et ainsi de suite.
Ma solution est beaucoup plus simple à gérer pour des contributeurs comme celui du projet cyclisme et reste assez logique et instinctive. Avec ce système, on n'est pas embêté avec le nom des équipes, puisque ça revient à suivre la solution actuelle où le lien renvoit vers la saison 2015 (les articles de saison sont les articles principaux, ceux des équipes sont des articles de fond, et non plus l'inverse). Par ce système, en plus de générer le tableau de la liste des participants, on peut également extraire les données de l'autre tableau listant les équipes participantes, ce qui fait d'une pierre deux coups.
@Jérémy-Günther-Heinz Jähnick: On ne cherche pas à faire des économies de propriétés, on veut simplement s'assurer que l'on une structure aussi générale que possible pour faciliter l'utilisation des données notamment les recherches: si pour chaque sport ou theme il faut appliquer une recherché en function d'une structure différente, on ne pourra jamais fournir d'outils généraux pour l'utilisation sur WP. Imagine que pour chaque type de liste tu doives créer une requête particulière pour cause de stockage des données selon un format spécifique et tu verras que tu auras du mal à trouver des personnes pour te donner un coup de main sur le travail de maintenance. Il faut donc penser global, mais global sportif: trouver les différents cas pour gérer les résultats sportifs (pas en function du sport, mais du type de données pour représenter tous les détails pertinents du classement final) et ensuite demander les propriétés adéquates. Snipre (talk) 16:24, 22 May 2015 (UTC)
@Harmonia Amanda: Ta manière de gérer les données est intéressante: mais au lieu d'utiliser point in time (P585) qui n'est pas comprehensible et surtout inutile pour les performances qui ne sont pas des dates, mieux vaudrait créer une nouvelle propriété "performance" qui accepte des valeurs avec unite et qui puisse être utilisée pour tous les sports: durée de la course pour le cyclisme et les course de chiens de traineau (je ne pense pas que les résultat sont donnés en jour), de même que pour toutes les courses de l'athlétisme, mais aussi longueur pour le saut en longueur, le lancer du javelot ou du poids,... significant event (P793) pour les abandons est un choix un peu difficile à faire passer, mieux vaudrait une propriété spécifique et voir si on peut la généraliser à d'autres sports pour favoriser son utilisation. Et pour l'équipe, je ne le noterait pas dans le classement, pour éviter les doublons avec les données indiquées sous l'élément du sportif, il faut trouver l'endroit le plus approprié entre le classement des courses ou les éléments des sportifs voire les éléments des equips elles-memes. Le plus important est de bien définir ce paramètre, car sinon chacun va créer son système et on ne pourra jamais avoir un moyen unique de récupérer cette information (il faudra 3 codes différents en fonction de l'endroit où se trouve la donnée équipe). Snipre (talk) 16:37, 22 May 2015 (UTC)

Property for 1st line of a poem ? (incipit)

Hello,

Is there a property to enter the 1st line (verse) of a poem… many poems have no title, and are recognized using their 1st line.

I remember a discussion about it, a year ago, but I cannot find it any more… so, is there a property to add it, or do I just input it in title (P1476) ?

Thanks for your help, there are already thousands of poems (from various wikisources) to complete on wikidata --Hsarrazin (talk) 03:42, 23 May 2015 (UTC)

Sounds like a good idea! No, I am, not aware of any property for that. IF you propose it, ping me and I will support! -- Innocent bystander (talk) 06:04, 23 May 2015 (UTC)
@Innocent bystander: done : here - hope I did it right, feel free to add info if you think I forgot some - thanks :) --Hsarrazin (talk) 10:04, 23 May 2015 (UTC)

Wikidata:WikiProject Elections

I have set up Wikidata:WikiProject Elections, feel free to tell us your ideas on the talk page. -- Innocent bystander (talk) 08:09, 23 May 2015 (UTC)

interwiki text

How can I access a specific interwiki link? Lets say I want to get the link to de.wiki for Q1524 (Athens). If I could get just a text string I would be happy aswell. Thnx in advance -- Spiros790 (talk) 18:55, 22 May 2015 (UTC)

I was looking for that as well. Module:Wikidata doesn't seem to offer it yet. --- Jura 06:16, 23 May 2015 (UTC)


how about that?

  • {{#invoke:Wikidata|getLabel|entity=Q1524|lang=it}} --> Atene
  • {{#invoke:Wikidata|getLabel|entity=Q1524|lang=de}} --> Athen
  • {{#invoke:Wikidata|getLabel|entity=Q1524|lang=el}} --> Αθήνα

thats not an interwiki text string but it should be OK in most cases.

-- Spiros790 (talk) 06:51, 23 May 2015 (UTC)

If that was reliable, we could do away with half of Wikidata ;) --- Jura 06:56, 23 May 2015 (UTC)
I need a way to get the name of an entity, in english, german, etc. It doesnt have to be a reliable link or something :) That would be cool though. I m creating infoboxes that use wikidata properties for el.wiki, currently tryin to retrieve the name of a city in its mother tongue. -- Spiros790 (talk) 07:40, 23 May 2015 (UTC)
There is a property "native name". I think it's meant for this, but I'm not sure if it's frequently used. An alternative would be "official name". --- Jura 07:48, 23 May 2015 (UTC)
a "native name" property is exactly what Ι am looking for. I don’t think Ι have ever seen it though. Thnx for your input :) -- Spiros790 (talk) 07:53, 23 May 2015 (UTC)
it exists for people name in native language (P1559)… but for places, I'm not sure… would be useful though… :)
besides, there would be a question of name at a certain period - Athens is not problematic, but Istanbul/Constantinople, etc. - would require date qualifier :) --Hsarrazin (talk) 10:11, 23 May 2015 (UTC)
There is an item for the old norse name of Constantinopel: Q2008228  
I have used official name (P1448) to Hälla (Q13106534), but I do not exactly know what is official with it, so I am not so sure about my choise in that case. And what the "native" name is, is difficult to say, since we do not really know who is "native" here. It depends on your pov. -- Innocent bystander (talk) 10:54, 23 May 2015 (UTC)
I don't think "official" is correct. The native name of "Athens" is "Αθήνα". Thats how Greeks call it. No pov here... -- Spiros790 (talk) 11:59, 23 May 2015 (UTC)
The pov-problem is what you consider as "native language" in this case. People have lived there for thousands of years, but we do not know which language they spoke and definitly not what they called the place. We know that today Swedish-speaking people uses the name "Hälla" and Sapmi-speaking people uses the name "Hïella". Some people say that a Germanic people have lived there, other Sapmi while some think a third group of Creole people lived there. My pov is that it was a Uralic people which later changed ethnicity and language into Swedish. Consider what would happen if you discovered that Sokrates used the name "Atina" for your "Αθήνα", since the place originally was Turkish and not Greek. -- Innocent bystander (talk) 16:26, 23 May 2015 (UTC)
Socrates called it ΑΘΗΝΑΙ and sure as hell it wasnt "Turkish" back then, thats just retarded. Anyway what I was lookin for was a way to get the name its current inhabitants use... i.e. your statement is irrelevant anyways.-- Spiros790 (talk) 17:32, 23 May 2015 (UTC)

As a rule of thumb, we should call "native" the name given to it by its current inhabitants. I call Istanbul "Constantinople", because I am Greek and my ancestors used to live there. But we should use "Istanbul" for a "native name" property here. -- Spiros790 (talk) 12:03, 23 May 2015 (UTC)

what I meant was that the native name can change through time… ;) — see
as for Istanbul (Q406), its current native name woul be İstanbul (in turkish) , and not Istanbul ;)
native meaning as the natives call/write it is different from official - but probably official name (P1448) would be a good approximation, since the intent was to get the "in the language of the country" writing, more than the "legal pov" :)
the nickname given by natives would certainly not be what you want to get here, (like Paname for Paris (Q90)) --Hsarrazin (talk) 13:42, 23 May 2015 (UTC)
yes it can change through time. But what we should care about is now. Please stick to the points that are being made, not to irrelevant spelling errors like "İstanbul". Official name is wrong. Most of them are like "Municipality of X". Nicknames are also wrong for obvious reasons.
btw I am well aware about the history of Istanbul/Constantinople, my family used to live there until the 30ies... Some of them are still alive and well today.
yep the native name of this city would be İstanbul
thnx for your feedback :) -- Spiros790 (talk) 14:00, 23 May 2015 (UTC)


another approach would be to record all native names through history and rank=best the one used today. For İstanbul: Βυζάντιον --> Κωνσταντινούπολη --> İstanbul. I don’t think that this is useful info though. There are also serious POV problems -- Spiros790 (talk) 14:07, 23 May 2015 (UTC)

BTW, would anyone have an answer to the initial question? --- Jura 07:24, 24 May 2015 (UTC)

yep that would be intresting, we are not here to discuss history... -- Spiros790 (talk) 08:26, 24 May 2015 (UTC)

Can you help? Thank you, Conny (talk) 14:30, 23 May 2015 (UTC).

Stryn only 1 project uses it. -- Magioladitis (talk) 14:28, 24 May 2015 (UTC)
I know many pages (including templates) that doesn't exist on other wikis... --Stryn (talk) 14:29, 24 May 2015 (UTC)
It has no tranclusions. It will be deleted from the wiki soon. WE can only wait. -- Magioladitis (talk) 14:31, 24 May 2015 (UTC)
It's still up to the local community whether they want to keep the template for historical purposes or not. We on Wikidata can't make the decision. --Stryn (talk) 14:35, 24 May 2015 (UTC)

Entering information on new item not in Wikipedia yet

I created a new item. Where do I enter text?  – The preceding unsigned comment was added by Blaze2453 (talk • contribs) at 20:35, 23 May 2015‎ (UTC).

You'll have to create a new article on any of the other Wikimedia projects, this is also the place where you can enter text. Wikidata is meant to connect the several articles on the other projects, this is done with the links on the right hand side. Edoderoo (talk) 08:37, 24 May 2015 (UTC)
As you can imagine, it is a wee bit more complicated.. Text, sure. Statements are very much information that can be added to Wikidata. Thanks, GerardM (talk) 09:36, 24 May 2015 (UTC)
@Edoderoo: You misanderstand Wikidata, Wikidata is here to build a database of structure datas. This interwiki feature is a small part of this project :) Wikidata is here to build statements like  who will be readable from any language, and also by machines. What text is obviously not :) TomT0m (talk) 09:51, 24 May 2015 (UTC)

Not sure how to add something "safely"

I didn't have much time to look through the help pages, and I couldn't quickly see how best to do this; could someone else do it and leave a tutorial (or link to one) on how best to do it? I was afraid I'd break the metadata by introducing something with wrong formatting or wrong content if I just clicked the "Add reference".

Hilbert space, Q190056, can be linked to OCLC ARN 2072176. Could you please add it? Nyttend (talk) 17:32, 18 May 2015 (UTC)

@Nyttend: I took a shot at it but apparently fail at such things since I could not get a link to show up that directed me to the appropriate location. Do you have a URL that would be associated with that number, where https://www.worldcat.org/oclc/$1 is the format of the url and $1 is the ID? It should be numerical only. You can add it yourself to Q190056 in similar fashion to what I just failed to do... (don't forget, this is a wiki, so trying things out yourself is okay).

Otherwise, we may not have the property to make the claim you are trying to make. --Izno (talk) 19:45, 18 May 2015 (UTC)

No, I don't have a URL, unfortunately. When you're using OCLC Connexion Client and browse the LCSH authority file for "Hilbert space", it shows you a subject header for "Hilbert space", and the OCLC record number for this SH is 2072176. It's not the title of a work, so it doesn't have an OCLC number per se. This is precisely why I was hesitant — I didn't even know if we were attempting to link LCSH entries with other data, let alone how to do it if we should. Nyttend (talk) 22:14, 18 May 2015 (UTC)
Two questions: Is the ID you're providing a unique, permanent ID, and, do you know if it can be derived from some other ID (OCLC or other closely related ID)? If yes and no respectively, it's probably a good candidate for WD:Property proposal/Authority control. --Izno (talk) 15:45, 19 May 2015 (UTC)
WD:WikiProject Authority control might be able to help too. --Izno (talk) 16:01, 19 May 2015 (UTC)
Izno, I expect that it's permanent, because the only way to assign this LCSH a new number would be to delete the authority file and create a new one, and that would mess up every single linked OCLC record of every type, whether ordinary bibliographic entries or other things. However, I was proposing using the OCLC number just because it was conveniently available for the LCSH. Is it possible to link LC subject headings to other kinds of records for the same topic? Q190056 currently links to an NDL entry that looks like it might be comparable to the LC topical subject heading that's listed in the print edition of LCSH and the free online edition of LCSH. Is my request now clear? Nyttend (talk) 03:18, 20 May 2015 (UTC)
Your request was cleaer to begin with--I just don't have the domain knowledge. --Izno (talk) 03:25, 20 May 2015 (UTC)
@Multichill, Kolja21: Maybe one of you can help. --Izno (talk) 03:29, 20 May 2015 (UTC)
Okay, thanks. I've only been working in cataloging since January (I didn't have the chance to take a cataloging class in library school; they don't even offer it anymore!), so I'm not as confident on this kind of thing as I wish I were. Not to mention my near-total unfamiliarity with how Wikidata typically operates. Nyttend (talk) 03:32, 20 May 2015 (UTC)
The LCSH can be looked up here. Hilbert space (Q190056): Library of Congress authority ID (P244) = sh85060803. P244 can be used for Library of Congress Name Authority File (Q18912790) and Library of Congress Subject Headings (Q1823134) (more infos by Gymel). --Kolja21 (talk) 04:17, 20 May 2015 (UTC)
Huh? At Property talk:P244#LCSH I merely stated my observation that this property apparently is also used for LCSH numbers, contrary to the definition at the time of the proposal. Changing the description of P244 might be an easy resolution, however at en:Template_talk:Authority control#At the moment, it is used almost exclusively in biographical articles there are complaints that this extended usage breaks the Authority Control template at en:WP: They also use the P244 value to provide links to OCLC WorldCat and this appears to work for the "n"-valued ids of the LCNAF entries but not for the "s"-valued of LCSH. AFAIK OCLC has developed its own system of FAST headings (Faceted Application of Subject Terminology, cf. en:Faceted Application of Subject Terminology but for the Hilbert Space example (LCCN sh 85060803) the identifier would be http://id.worldcat.org/fast/956785 aka fst956785 (but this does not provide links to the resources related to that).
As for User:Nyttend's example "ARN 2072176": Keyword search for "2072176" yields mostly titles related to Hilbert Spaces in WorldCat, and searches for something with 060803 or 85060803 from the LCCN or 956785 from FAST result in nothing helpful. Also for subject headings there does not exist an interface like http://www.worldcat.org/identities for persons, organizations &c. So I tend to back the claim that "ARN 2072176" is or corresponds to some internal OCLC number for their copy of LCSH for the benefit of their members but there seems no way to research, verify or even utilize this from the outside, i.e. with the means provided by WorldCat.org. -- Gymel (talk) 00:14, 21 May 2015 (UTC)
This is authority record number 2072176, i.e. record #2072176 in Connexion contains the metadata that allows the LCSH "Hilbert space" to function in Connexion Client and (perhaps) to connect to everything else in OCLC; I don't know if the number is particularly relevant outside the internal Connexion servers. We'd have to find someone with access to Connexion Browser to know whether it's just something with this one client program or something broader, not to mention talking with someone with OCLC to learn if there's a way to match numbers and LCSH with freely accessible resources. Nyttend (talk) 13:16, 25 May 2015 (UTC)

Talking with @Ahoerstemeier: there is a doubt about this property. I have added Italian version here but but for Ahoerstemeier isn't correct because English description of the property say «official name of the subject in its official language». So how to use this property? --ValterVB (talk) 18:54, 24 May 2015 (UTC)

ValterVB, this property is for the official name as defined in some official source (usually a law or parliamentary resolution). Some countries and cities will actually define official names in more than one language. That is why the "official name of 'Thailand' is something in Thai which I cannot read because I don't understand Thai. Unofficial translations should go in the Label or in the aliases. If you don't have a source to confirm that 'Regno di Thailandia' is officially endorsed by the government then it should be deleted.
There is some discussion of 'transliteration' properties or a 'translation' property which could be used as qualifiers to 'official name' but these properties have not yet been approved. Filceolaire (talk) 20:40, 24 May 2015 (UTC)
ราชอาณาจักรไทย translates to "Kingdom of Thailand". The translation of this term, which then would be in all possible languages, should not use the mono-lingual datatype, but the still planned multilingual datatype, that's why that property is still pending. By the way, there's also quite a big overlap between official name (P1448) and native label (P1705), in most cases the official name would be the same as the native label. Ahoerstemeier (talk) 20:49, 24 May 2015 (UTC)
In en.wiki I read: "Thailand officially the Kingdom of Thailand", in it.wiki I read: "La Thailàndia ufficialmente Regno di Thailandia", in de.wiki I read "Thailand offiziell Königreich Thailand", in fr.wiki I read "La Thaïlande, en forme longue le Royaume de Thaïlande", so every language have an official name that is also used in infobox. --ValterVB (talk) 20:56, 24 May 2015 (UTC)
Since Thailand has embassies in many countries, and those embassies will communicate "officially" with the governments of those countries in their respective languages about matters concerning the Kingdom of Thailand, I presume there exist official names for the item in many, many more languages than the official ones "of" the item. So what to do with "official" names of the item in "unofficial" languages? -- Gymel (talk) 21:08, 24 May 2015 (UTC)
These are official translations but not official names. Snipre (talk) 07:21, 25 May 2015 (UTC)

Microsoft Combat Flight Simulator (Q1735558) seems to be mixed up, can somebody split it? Sjoerd de Bruin (talk) 13:07, 25 May 2015 (UTC)

Ratified date, effective date

Using the example of Continental Association (Q4231641), the date created is October 20, 1774, the date ratified is the same, and the effective/operative date is December 1, 1774. For the first, I'd use inception (P571) but I can't seem to find any for the other two. Before I go requesting new properties, I'd like to assume that something is already in existence. What have others used? Thanks, Hazmat2 (talk) 22:36, 24 May 2015 (UTC)

Instead of creating new properties, I would use significant event (P793), i.e.
Thanks for the info. Second question then: how would one go about calling these qualifier statements in an infobox? w:Template:Infobox document is the specific one I'm using at the moment. Thanks, Hazmat2 (talk) 17:40, 25 May 2015 (UTC)
Look at your module module:wikidata in your WP (ex.: fr:Module:Wikidata). If someone develops the code you should be able to filter results according to some qualifiers or some values. You should perhaps code a little in lua to obtain the data you want. Look if someone already develops module:infobox. The main of advantage of significant event (P793) is the possibility to group all data (time, location, person,...) in one statment. Snipre (talk) 19:51, 25 May 2015 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #159

Adding coordinates

It states that en:Newfound Regional High School doesn't have a coordination on wikidata, so how'd I put that on here? The coordinate is 43° 36′ 25.2″ N, 71° 40′ 37.2″ W Nick2crosby (talk) 22:06, 25 May 2015 (UTC)

Hi Nick. Welcome to wikidata. Here are my comments for you:
To link to an item on wikidata you need to use the q number Q19962872 as we can have lots of items with the same label. There are a couple of cute templates for doing this too. Newfound Regional High School (Q19962872) shows the label in the readers preferred language. Newfound Regional High School (Q19962872)      includes a link to Reasonator - a cool interface for displaying our data.
I changed to the statement you added. Most thing on wikidata are an 'instance of' something. Getting that right helps the property suggester find the most helpful suggestions. Now that there is an 'instance of:high school' statement you will find that if you try to add more statements our property suggester has 'coordinate location' as one of the top suggestions so I'm going to leave it to you to add the coordinates (unless someone else gets there first).
Wikidata:Showcase_items is a good place to see what good items look like, though we don't seem to have any other high schools there yet.
Hope that helps. Filceolaire (talk) 03:15, 26 May 2015 (UTC)

Tracking changes that just impact Wikivoyage?

Wikivoyage has 18 separate language communities, and we are using WikiData for our banner images so that (for example) a banner created for one destination can be automatically reused everywhere.

One identified scenario is that if somebody on 'Language X' Wikivoyage uploads a banner that is of worse quality than the one it is replacing on English Wikivoyage, then it will not appear in our wiki's 'recent changes' and basically go unnoticed.

A deeper discussion can be seen here

Does anyone here have any suggestions about how we can monitor these changes that impact Wikivoyage without tracking the 'recent changes' of all WikiData items? --Andrewssi2 (talk) 01:28, 26 May 2015 (UTC)

You can go to Special:RecentChanges on Wikivoyage and monitor the changes (you may have to turn on "Show Wikidata edits" in Preferences, or in the header). --Rschen7754 02:22, 26 May 2015 (UTC)
@Andrewssi2: gadget from ruwiki let's you monitor changes even with extended watchlist. Another option is to create bot that updates special page s with, let's say, 100 last updates of «page banner» property on all item. -- VlSergey (gab) 06:21, 26 May 2015 (UTC)

How to get the value of a qualifier from a property if an other qualifier has a specific value?

Hello,

I'm trying to extract the publication date from version if version type is either stable version, beta version or alpha version. Is there a way to do that? I'm trying it out on the Wikidata Sandbox with Modèle:Infobox Logiciel/Bac à sable and Wikipédia:Wikidata/Bac à sable The RedBurn (ϕ) 18:19, 25 May 2015 (UTC)

@The RedBurn: Before answering such questions, I'd like a discussion aboout the model … What's the bigger picture about software items model you have in mind. I'd like to see if it would be better to have one item per realease … But the answer anyway : use a scribunto module and code in luas. TomT0m (talk) 18:27, 25 May 2015 (UTC)
Thank you for the quick answer! What do you mean by one item per release? No alpha / beta version? Or either an alpha or beta version? Or only a stable version? Or no history of the versions? The RedBurn (ϕ) 18:32, 25 May 2015 (UTC)
I mean items like for example <Linux 3.0> with statements like
⟨ Linux 3.0 ⟩ instance of (P31)   ⟨ Linux stable Release ⟩
and
⟨ linux 3.0 ⟩ edition or translation of (P629)   ⟨ Linux kernel (Q14579)      ⟩
in a similar model (and maybe the same properties) of the Wikiproject Book (see also Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (Q16388)     . This allows to put statements like added features and so on.
Well, it would probably be too much for the current intended use: the latest stable and unstable versions of a software for the French software infobox. The RedBurn (ϕ) 07:47, 26 May 2015 (UTC)
@The RedBurn: We need to think bigger imho :) We got an effective model for this, and migrating to this later will be harder. The devteam has already deployed the feature needed to make this work on infoboxes on some projects (including Wikidata for tests). This overall is to reduce redundancy. TomT0m (talk) 08:06, 26 May 2015 (UTC)
@TomT0m: I guess you mean that for pages like Android_version_history, but those aren't the majority and it could be done differently just for them, without adding complexity to the majority. The RedBurn (ϕ) 08:22, 26 May 2015 (UTC)
@The RedBurn: I does not add complexity to have only one model, it makes things more simple. It just add a little extra work : creating an item for a release. That's all. TomT0m (talk) 08:32, 26 May 2015 (UTC)
@TomT0m: I think it also adds complexity to have multiple items for one page. And that extra work isn't needed for 99.9 % of the pages, so I personally think it's overkill and I won't try to find a consensus to change the current system, but feel free to do so. The RedBurn (ϕ) 08:38, 26 May 2015 (UTC)
@The RedBurn: There is very often several items for one page (see the discussion about Wikivoyage earlier ;). What's the current system by the way ? We should create Wikidata:WikiProject Software anyway. I think it's a good thing in Wikidata to have, in general, precise items. For example in the opensource world, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (Q215273)      is an item that refers to tons of versions, tons of feature. It quickly needs a more sophisticated model if we want to be expressive, like pointing to a specific version of a sotware included into a version of RHEL. It turns out we have one, at a very low cost. With adding features to version made easy later. Plus the power of Wikidata who will make this available to all Wikipedias so the maiftenance cost will be overall reduced … It would be a shame to do less :) TomT0m (talk) 08:57, 26 May 2015 (UTC)
@TomT0m: Well, the infobox of Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux doesn't seem like it needs that. So it would seem like fixing something that isn't broken and/or killing a fly with a cannon (against Confucius' advice). The RedBurn (ϕ) 09:38, 26 May 2015 (UTC)
@The RedBurn: Infoboxes are not very sophisticated … Wikidata is far more expressive. Are not such changes a time to think a little bit ? Maybe the infobox is like that just because it was very hard to do better at that time. Now things have changed, opportunity to think again … We're into no rush ;) Maybe we should involve the local communities ? TomT0m (talk) 09:53, 26 May 2015 (UTC)

deleted property

What happens here? Thank you, Conny (talk) 14:57, 26 May 2015 (UTC).

As the property P132 (I remember it was "type of administrative unit" and was replaced by instance of (P31)) is deleted, the software cannot now access metadata of the property. Matěj Suchánek (talk) 15:18, 26 May 2015 (UTC)
@Lea Lacroix (WMDE): Maybe a paper cut? It's a little rough to use the generic error interface message in the edit history. --Izno (talk) 16:39, 26 May 2015 (UTC)
You're right. Not nice. I'll see if we can improve this. --Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) (talk) 18:01, 26 May 2015 (UTC)

P1900

Those of you who like to keep track of our milestones might like to note that I have just created EAGLE id (P1900). Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 15:09, 26 May 2015 (UTC)

Hello, is it advisable (as I did) to use Property:P31 with encyclopedia article (Q17329259)? Jonathan Groß (talk) 16:50, 26 May 2015 (UTC)

@Jonathan Groß: That depndds, onwhich item ? For a Wikipedia article it's not, but in the case of an item about an article of another encyclopedia … it is. TomT0m (talk) 16:55, 26 May 2015 (UTC)
On Ἀποικία (Pauly-Wissowa) (Q19828642). Yes, this or a more specific one. Obviously, someone should probably set it for all pages of the same book at once.
More important is main subject (P921). --- Jura 16:56, 26 May 2015 (UTC)
That's what I had in mind. main subject (P921) would be more difficult to fill automatically.
I want to tag all articles from the Pauly encyclopedia. Can I add another property that states that these articles come from this specific encyclopedia? Jonathan Groß (talk) 17:10, 26 May 2015 (UTC)
One solution is to create an item <Pauly encyclopedia's article>, with
⟨ Pauly encyclopedia's article ⟩ subclass of (P279)   ⟨ encyclopedia article (Q17329259)      ⟩
. An use instance of (P31). It's also possible to use part of (P361). TomT0m (talk) 17:16, 26 May 2015 (UTC)


To add, published in (P1433) with Paulys Realenzyklopädie der klassischen Altertumswissenschaft (Q1138524), you can use this.
As the main topic is already defined in a template, someone might be able to extract that and add it. --- Jura 17:22, 26 May 2015 (UTC)
To scan for articles only, the category "RE:Autoren nach Artikelzahl" might be the most suitable one. --- Jura 17:38, 26 May 2015 (UTC)
Thank you :) I started creating the items with the Item Creator. I suppose it will be running all night. I'll add the properties when all the items are created. Jonathan Groß (talk) 18:31, 26 May 2015 (UTC)

Open for SI-unit properties

Progress on implementing numeric properties with units - such as length/distance, area, time and speed - is slow and only rarely appears on the weekly update. A number of properties are on hold due to this.

Would it be possible to allow properties, where an SI-unit exists. The description of the unit could include the SI-unit in use. Examples:

  • Height - the vertical length stated in m.
  • Area - stated in m2.
  • Speed - stated in m/s.

When in the future the units are here, a bot would be able to append them by property.

Off course this will annoy authors used to feet and °C to have to use m and K - and prefixed units (eg. km) are ruled out as well. But it's just for now.

Lua-modules will still be able to display the numbers as the language of the wiki in question might dictate.

Poul G (talk) 17:01, 18 May 2015 (UTC)

I mean, what I think matters is that if people are willing to use a temporary solution, they must be ready and willing to do a mass conversion once units are implemented.--Jasper Deng (talk) 00:26, 19 May 2015 (UTC)
It does sound tempting given that we could easily loose another year or two waiting the for the first implementation of units. Conversion from the temporary solution should be quite easy.
The main issue I see is that the quantity datatype still needs improvement, see: Wikidata:Project_chat/Archive/2015/05#population.2B-0. --- Jura 06:00, 19 May 2015 (UTC)
We are not years but only a few months away from having unit support. In the end it is an editorial decision but please do keep in mind that anyone who uses this data will have to make significant adaptions again later. --Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) (talk) 10:05, 19 May 2015 (UTC)
+1 with Lydia Pintscher (WMDE). If you take the time to follow the work progress of the development team you can have a good estimation of what will happen in the next 2-4 months. Better waiting than doing partial job which will be a mess to handle later. We have already enough things to modify because initial data import or structure was not correct. Instead of forcing to be able to add some hundreds of values better prepare data in an external file and be ready to import all in once with a bot when the datatype is ready. Snipre (talk) 11:37, 19 May 2015 (UTC)
I did check the developers ticket-list, as the number-property rarely surfaces in the weekly reports. And found a few with low activity and relatively few followers. Where should I have looked to see "few months" or "2-4 months"? Poul G (talk) 21:51, 19 May 2015 (UTC)
@Poul G: See here for the general problem of the datatype with unit. Currently the problem is about how the user can select the unit (Unit Selector widget) treated by this bug. A discussion is ongoing about this last problem and you can follow it using this bug which in the current sprint of the development work (see that). Snipre (talk) 22:41, 23 May 2015 (UTC)
@Lydia Pintscher (WMDE): What would the list of predefined supported units be? ("The available units are from a list of predefined supported units." [5]) I guess the base units, the derived units, and their prefixes must be supported, but what about composite units and non-SI units accepted for use with SI? Which other systems will be supported, and to what degree will values be expressed in those systems? The question is really whether the unit system implemented will attempt to avoid data loss, or if the easier solution is chosen. Seems like tracking datum is dropped, can you confirm that? Jeblad (talk) 16:49, 24 May 2015 (UTC)
My hunch is that everything will be stored in SI units with other units converted to on demand. This could prove problematic, however, if the non-SI unit is the source unit and is specified exactly, since unit conversion would then cause loss of precision.--Jasper Deng (talk) 08:04, 27 May 2015 (UTC)
That is a very good point. Sooner or later we also need units for non-convertible units. I have read some early 20th century article recently, and they tells me that this and that was X feet wide and Y feet high. Today, I do not know the length of those feets. -- Innocent bystander (talk) 10:48, 27 May 2015 (UTC)
Yes we'll be supporting convertible and non-convertible units. As it currently looks you'll be able to say something is "12 ducks" ;-) --Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) (talk) 10:51, 27 May 2015 (UTC)
@Lydia Pintscher (WMDE): So, there will be no limitations at all to what units are allowed? We'll be able to add things like height: 3 apples? --Yair rand (talk) 20:16, 27 May 2015 (UTC)
That's the current plan to be in line with what you can do elsewhere in Wikidata. --Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) (talk) 10:02, 28 May 2015 (UTC)

1980's-90's exercise shows on PBS or KVCR

Does anyone remember the 1980's-90's exercise shows on PBS or KVCR if so, do you remember the names?

Placeholder comment as I can't find the user who wrote this section. --Liuxinyu970226 (talk) 10:08, 28 May 2015 (UTC)
@Liuxinyu970226: Special:Diff/216477778. Jared Preston (talk) 11:17, 28 May 2015 (UTC)

Articles mixed with disambiguation pages or categories

Looking at Wikidata:Database reports/Constraint violations there are a lot of cases where disambiguation pages or categories are merged with articles. Often the property instance of (P31) for disambiguation page or category then gets deleted and everything looks fine. (But of cause it isn't: The different items are still mixed and the descriptions are mixed as well.) Why not block the merging for articles with disambiguation pages and categories? --Kolja21 (talk) 21:09, 18 May 2015 (UTC)

More usually it's the case that a wiki is causing these changes. Two main ways this happens:
  • A wiki takes a disambiguation page and changes it to an actual topic page.
  • A wiki takes a topic page and changes it to a disambiguation page.
Some wikis do this I imagine without moving the pages in question, which Wikidata would otherwise catch. From what I recall, Wikidata probably doesn't catch all of the page moves because there's some lag on the Wikibase client script running, so that might be a 3rd way we're not catching it.

Otherwise, the 4th way is simply that they're extant problems from prior to using Wikidata. I would imagine we've caught most of those by now... In other words, there's nothing we can really do except let the constraints catch the offending items. --Izno (talk) 21:14, 18 May 2015 (UTC)

Sometimes it is really an error where there are disambig pages mixed with some real articles. In some cases the article is a mix between a disambig and a stub. I´ve also found some of these.--Giftzwerg 88 (talk) 22:06, 18 May 2015 (UTC)
Some may be leftovers before everyone has a SUL. If somebody without a SUL moved a page and created a disambiguation page on the former page, the sitelinks would stay the same and would be incorrect. You should compare the maintance category with the statements on Wikidata. Sjoerd de Bruin (talk) 06:41, 19 May 2015 (UTC)
I see an attitude among some Wikipedians that "a not so good interwiki is better than no interwiki at all". That attitude in combination with the attitude that "interwiki should always be done through Wikidata nowdays", makes this a work of Sisyphus (Q102561). -- Innocent bystander (talk) 04:21, 27 May 2015 (UTC)
There are articles which are categorised as Disambiguation pages which correspond to real world topics which need wikidata items. A lot of the 'Surname' pages are this. In some languages the article just lists people with that surname, in other languages the article has an introductory sentence about the surname before the list. In my opinion these articles should be linked to a wikidata item which has statements 'instance of:wikimedia disambiguation page' and 'instance of:surname'. These items are then used as the targets of 'surname' statements. The alternative is to create separate items for the disambiguation articles and for the surname, where the item for the surname has no articles linked to it. this means we have twice the number of items to maintain and we have statements linking to items with no sitelinks. Extra maintenance and less usefulness. Filceolaire (talk) 06:36, 22 May 2015 (UTC)
This is how I've done it and seen it done (two items). It doesn't make sense to me to have an item that is a disambiguation page and a surname when it's easy for the disambiguation item to link to the surname item. Plus, there are some names where the surname is actually a separate article from the disambiguation (list) page. The two-item method allows for consistency and correct separation of data. Hazmat2 (talk) 02:34, 27 May 2015 (UTC)

What happens with stalled proposals?

What happens with proposals, which went inactive? I've proposed something (the IRAC-Code) at Wikidata:Property proposal/Natural science, but then lost interest at Wikidata, because I had much to do in REALLIFE but also on my home Wikipedia. Now I can't find it – is there a unsearchable hell for stalled proposals?--Kopiersperre (talk) 20:16, 27 May 2015 (UTC)

If you ask me they just should be created after one month or so if no one oppose. Or faster. TomT0m (talk) 20:28, 27 May 2015 (UTC)
You mean Wikidata:Property proposal/Archive/31#IRAC code? (Special:Search, advanced search, Wikidata and Property namespaces, then found). Visite fortuitement prolongée (talk) 21:44, 27 May 2015 (UTC)
Thanks--Kopiersperre (talk) 09:33, 28 May 2015 (UTC)

New property needed?

Is there any property available to link United States Secretary of State (Q14213) with United States Department of State (Q789915) or vice versa? The closest I could find were officeholder (P1308)/position held (P39) and chairperson (P488), but they are limited to items about humans, and this case is about a position in an organisation. Andreasm háblame / just talk to me 04:36, 28 May 2015 (UTC)

Property "part of". Snipre (talk) 07:02, 28 May 2015 (UTC)
I think the point is to specify that the United States Secretary of State (Q14213) is the head of the United States Department of State (Q789915), not just a generic part of it. --Yair rand (talk) 07:35, 28 May 2015 (UTC)
So use office held by head of government (P1313) after modifying the label. Snipre (talk) 11:14, 28 May 2015 (UTC)
That would drastically change the meaning of the property. office held by head of government (P1313) is used on items for countries and political divisions and such, not their governments. --Yair rand (talk) 17:22, 28 May 2015 (UTC)

Hmm .. yeah .. --- Jura 09:12, 28 May 2015 (UTC)

Technically, it's not an encyclopedic article but a cross reference. Jonathan Groß (talk) 12:14, 28 May 2015 (UTC)

WikiNews links

Pirate Party Germany (Q13129) should be an item of it's own for the four wikinews articles, that are linked by main subject to this item? In this way we can only have one WikiNews-article about any subject, which is wrong anyways. Edoderoo (talk) 16:27, 17 May 2015 (UTC)

The way Wikinews articles are currently handled is a mess. Wikinews articles are about events, but are getting linked to items about partly-associated entities and then treated both as items about the associated topic, and as items about the Wikinews article. Much of the contents of Special:WhatLinksHere/Q17633526 are just wrong. In my opinion, we need to rethink how Wikinews articles are handled in general, and then do some major repair work on the existing items and links. I don't think that any of these items should link to Wikinews article (Q17633526) or use language of work or name (P407), really. --Yair rand (talk) 16:58, 17 May 2015 (UTC)
The way I treated them until now: a Wikinews article has it's own wikidata-entry, always. It is not linked to any of the other projects, to my idea. Then the language makes more sense, as all the listed languages do have a wikinews-article in that particular language. It now goes wrong where a Wikinews article is linked on a Wikidata entry of a person, a building, a city, etc. We indeed need to do (quite) some repair work, but I believe that 99% of the items are actually OK, but the 1% is causing quite some headache. Edoderoo (talk) 18:10, 17 May 2015 (UTC)
as an example: Jamaican Usain Bolt breaks world record 100m to 9.72 sec (Q19931054) is now taken out of Usain Bolt (Q1189) (see history for my edits). I see that the Polish language article is a news article on the same subject, but a different occasion, so I will create a new entry (Usain Bolt sets world record 200m (Q19931072)) for that as well. To my opinion, that is how we should treat Wikinews articles. Edoderoo (talk) 18:36, 17 May 2015 (UTC)
The use of language of work or name (P407) in Wikinews items is wrong because it is not corresponding to the general way in WD. We don't add language of work or name (P407) to all others items when they are linked to a specific WP (we don't add language of work or name (P407): english to an item linked to WP:en). ::: An item about one Wikinews article or about an WP article if linked to english Wikinews or WP:en is ALWAYS in English. This is just a redundant information which is a useless maintenance work to maintain as all redundant informations. Snipre (talk) 19:40, 17 May 2015 (UTC)
Right, that is about the smallest issue. What about the big issue, that a WikiNews article is linked on the WD-entry of it's main subject? Edoderoo (talk) 20:07, 17 May 2015 (UTC)
@Edoderoo: This is a structural problem. Acording to Wikinews structure, everything should be an item but this is not the case in WD. For example if there is a Wikinews article about the birth of a person, we should have an item about the birth of that person. But in the current structure of WD, birth data are added as statements. More we are performing some experiments with WD and more I thing Wikinews can't be included in the current WD. This is not the only issue we have with a database which is used to store data and to store links between projects. We have two different objects and the problem is we try to keep them together and something to create interactions inside the same system. Typical examples are the categories items. Snipre (talk) 21:10, 17 May 2015 (UTC)
The articles you linked to are about events. As such, they should have instance of (P31) occurrence (Q1190554), and they should be linked to articles on other wikis about the event. If there were a Wikipedia article on "Establishment of the German Pirate Party", it could be linked to the Wikinews articles you referred to earlier. These items can have normal relations with other items. For example, the item on Pirate Party Germany (Q13129) could link to the item about its establishment using statement is subject of (P805) as a qualifier of inception (P571). --Yair rand (talk) 20:14, 17 May 2015 (UTC)
@Yair rand: The problem is that WD doesn't store each event as an item. Just think about birth and death of people: most of data about these kind of events are stored as statements. According to Wikinews structure these should be items in order to create appropriated links. This is the problem of mixing data in a structured way with site-links which suppose that everything can be an item in order to create an unique link. Or we have to allow multiples links from the same site to an unique item, but in that case we create a phone book and not more a structured database. Snipre (talk) 21:18, 17 May 2015 (UTC)
Wikidata has plenty of items on events. If you have an item regarding a relation between two topics or an topic and a time/location/etc, and that relation is primarily stored as a statement, use statement is subject of (P805) as a qualifier to the statement to associate the other article. For example, if there was an item "birth of X", then you would add "statement is subject of (P805): birth of X" as a qualifier to X's date of birth (P569). --Yair rand (talk) 21:24, 17 May 2015 (UTC)
The problem is not the fact that some events are represented by items. The problem is that for some events which are defined as statements we need to create empty or data redundant items just to be able to create a link to the Wikines article, the problem is in that mixture of models (sometimes event as item, sometimes event as statement). We have to choose between two models: a all-events-as-item model or we keep the statement for describing some events and we have to find a different way to link the statement directly to the site via a sitelink. Snipre (talk) 23:25, 17 May 2015 (UTC)
Most of the connections can be linked by main subject (P921) out of the wikidata-entry, especially when the news is about persons. In case of events, like accidents, it might be that there is no related article, and there is nothing to be linked. To my idea, the good thing when using main subject (P921) is that the wikinews articles will show up when using Reasonator, without the link they will simply never show up. Edoderoo (talk) 22:09, 17 May 2015 (UTC)
Why wouldn't they show up if the items' topics were considered the article topics instead of the articles themselves, like we do with Wikipedia articles? They could even be linked with significant event (P793) in the otherwise statement-less cases. --Yair rand (talk) 22:46, 17 May 2015 (UTC)
You mean in the way it was in Usain Bolt before I took the Wikinews articles out? Because you can then only link ONE Wikinews article on every Wikipedia-article. Where many politicians have multiple Wikinews articles about them. Major events (Tour de France, Olympic Games, etc) probably have more then one item too. In database language, there is a one-to-many relation, where it is now linked as a one-to-one relationship. Edoderoo (talk) 22:53, 17 May 2015 (UTC)
No, that's not what I mean. I mean having a separate item for the event, with the Wikinews articles linked, but not treating it as an item for a Wikinews article, but rather as an item for the event that is the topic of the linked articles. There should not be a linked Wikipedia article unless Wikipedia also has an article specifically on the event. --Yair rand (talk) 23:17, 17 May 2015 (UTC)
I start to believe that we need some clear examples, on how it's wrong, and how it's correct. Preferably with perma-links, else the items might change over time. I'm afraid that we're not all interpreting the terms in the same way (which might be due to not having all English as primary language, which is as well the case for me) and clear examples might bypass that problem. Edoderoo (talk) 07:09, 18 May 2015 (UTC)
First version, with the topics combined, which is currently the state of many items. This obviously have many problems, and I think we can all agree that it shouldn't be the standard.
Second version, with an item that has the Wikinews article itself as its topic. If I have understood correctly, this is the system supported by Edoderoo. Since it's being considered as a published piece of news, it has main subject (P921) linking to the other item.
Third version, with an item that has an event as its topic, with links to Wikinews articles that cover that particular event. As an ordinary event, it fits into the data model in the ordinary manner, and is linked to from the other item as shown. Should Wikipedia also have in article on the event (which is not true in the example given), then it would also have pages linked to that event's item. This is the system that I support.
--Yair rand (talk) 15:58, 18 May 2015 (UTC)
Given the case there are one or multiple wikinews article about an event, lets say a sports final, it makes no sense to assign language of work or name (P407) to the item. Everyone, or even a stupid bot can detect the language(s) of the article(s) based on the wikilink(s). So if there is a link on Jamaican Usain Bolt breaks world record 100m to 9.72 sec (Q19931054) to de.wikinews we can safely assume that the language is German. We also do not assign language of work or name (P407) with value German (Q188) to Usain Bolt (Q1189) because there is a German article linked to the item.--Giftzwerg 88 (talk) 21:57, 18 May 2015 (UTC)
I am actually in favour of the second hypotesis: it saves the links between WN versions, but we also can define what the article is about, and the item itself can be used as a qualifier or even as a source. --Sannita - not just another it.wiki sysop 16:33, 19 May 2015 (UTC)
@Sannita: Can you give an example of when such an item would be useful as a qualifier? --Yair rand (talk) 20:11, 19 May 2015 (UTC)
@Yair rand: I'm sure the idea of the qualifier made sense when I wrote that, but I literally can't remember what I thought. So for the time being, you might want to scratch the qualifier part and keep just the source part. Sannita - not just another it.wiki sysop 15:13, 21 May 2015 (UTC)
So, regardless of whether these items are to be treated as news pieces or events, are we in agreement that they shouldn't have language of work or name (P407) statements? If not, does anyone have arguments in favor of them? --Yair rand (talk) 21:29, 26 May 2015 (UTC)
What about other properties for Wikinews article? As a creative work this is a news, so it can have publication date (P577). Also when it is about some speech it can have author (P50) and performer (P175), and sometimes cast member (P161). --Infovarius (talk) 09:26, 29 May 2015 (UTC)

Aliases in other-language scripts

Hello. I'm new to Wikidata but have been trying to clean up some of the items for Korean music artists, primarily by adding descriptions. However, I've also been cleaning up the English- and Korean-language "also known as" fields by, for instance, removing the names of individual members from group entries, which apparently were pulled in by accident. My question comes from the following: I've also removed names in the alias field of English entries in Korean and Chinese scripts (they are already present in those languages' entries, so there was no actual loss of information). Additionally, I've removed copious amounts of alternative romanizations from these fields, as these aren't usually included in the subjects' Wikipedia entries unless they are especially prominent or confusing. I figured all these things had been pulled in automatically when information was pulled into Wikidata. However, I belatedly checked the article histories and found that the info had been added manually by another user. I left a message for that user but it appears he/she is only active here sporadically. I've read the guideline for aliases but found no help. Could anyone provide clarification about inclusion of non-roman scripts and alternate romanizations as aliases in the English-language Wikidata? Thank you so much for any help! Shinyang-i (talk) 17:35, 21 May 2015 (UTC)

@Shinyang-i: Aliases are intended to help users find an item; if the user types one of those other romanisations, they will only find the item if it is present as an alias, Please restore those you have removed. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 17:43, 21 May 2015 (UTC)
@Pigsonthewing:Can you provide a guideline as to how many romanizations should be included? There can be sometimes 30 or 40 for a single name. It will go far, far beyond what were originally present. Also, are aliases providing the same functionality as redirects do on Wikipedia? Shinyang-i (talk) 17:45, 21 May 2015 (UTC)
@Shinyang-i: See Help:Aliases. --Yair rand (talk) 17:55, 21 May 2015 (UTC)
@Yair rand: Already did that, as stated above. Can anyone actually engage with me in a discussion of this topic instead of admonishing and pointing? This is worse than Wikipedia for biting the newbies. Shinyang-i (talk) 17:58, 21 May 2015 (UTC)
This seems to get high rather quickly here. There is no limit to the number of alias an item can have, and this is not a priority to set one. Aliases are just here to help, nothing more. I see no reason to set a limit. Do you have only aesthetics concerns ? If it ain't broken, don't fix it. TomT0m (talk) 18:09, 21 May 2015 (UTC)
Of course I don't have "aesthetics concerns", I was merely trying to get information; I don't know why you're endowing me with emotional motivations on this. I have zero problem with including dozens of romanizations. But I was told to restore what I'd removed, yet what I'd removed was only a drop in the bucket of what apparently was supposed to be there, and thus the answer wasn't exactly clear. The documentation on Wikidata is pretty sparse and there aren't a lot of historic discussions to refer to. Navigation is a little more challenging than at Wikipedia. A lot of the existing items are not "clean" at the moment, and there are no such things as "Good Articles" to look to for best practices. It's impossible to know if changes previously made to items are "correct" or not without asking. Thus, "stupid questions" like mine are inevitable and I think should be treated with a tad more respect than what I feel I've received. I'm pretty blunt myself but this has been a bit much. Not very motivating. Shinyang-i (talk) 18:17, 21 May 2015 (UTC)
Is it clear now ? TomT0m (talk) 18:35, 21 May 2015 (UTC)
Well, no. Further questions:
  • The "fuzzy" spelling issue mentioned in the Aliases documentation - is it live yet and what kind of "fuzzy" spelling does it recognize? For instance, will "nyeo" and "nyuh" in romanization of Korean be seen as "fuzzy" spellings?
  • Should other-language-script names be included, and if so, how many languages? Those from all Wikipedias? Previously only Korean and Chinese were added. How about hanja (subject's name in Korean Chinese-origin characters, which may or may not be the same as their name in Chinese)? Thai? Russian? Etc.
  • Clarify capitalization - in my experiences on Wikipedia, capitalization of a single word makes no difference but it does for all-caps words; i.e. btb = Btb but btb or Btb =/= BTB. Is that correct?
  • "Alias" implies it's an alias for the item in question, but on Wikipedia redirects are often used to send a user who types in the name of a non-notable band member to the band's article. So should non-notable band member names be included in aliases of the band, as well? (Aliases documentation indicates "no", yet they were there and I was told to restore what I'd deleted...)
  • If a person's entry name is their full name but they are often called by just one of those names, does the single name need to be added as an alias? Example: Item name: John Smith. Is "John" needed as an alias? Again, it seems like "no", but I was told to restore what'd I'd removed, and I removed a lot of those...
These are the major issues I've run into so far. I'm sure more will pop up. Thank you for your time. Shinyang-i (talk) 18:51, 21 May 2015 (UTC)
This is not major issues from my point of view, and has a very low impact. So my answer will be I don't really care. And most of Wikidatans as well. That's why you can't find a lot of documentation on this, and as far as I can tell it's a good thing :) So my advice : don't take too much time on this and just focus on something else. TomT0m (talk) 19:09, 21 May 2015 (UTC)
Except maybe for the band members one : it should be clear that an item about a band must not be used to speak on one of its member who should have its own item. So if there is no item for the band member, remove the alias so that this do not happens. On the other hand if the band member item exists and that it is far better know than the name of the band, it could help to find the band item. TomT0m (talk) 19:13, 21 May 2015 (UTC)
@Shinyang-i: From what I can see, the aliases are there to make it easier to find the items. There is no sematic statements based on them. There is no way to add a source to them and there is nothing who tells that they always have to be correctly spelled. I would prefer to say that there is no definite truth about what the aliases should include, except that they should include things that will help the users and the search-engins to find the correct item. My opinion is that you should make a judgement of your own, and not try to identify an exact policy for every issue. Of course, there are aliases that should not be there. If you search for Antichrist, you should normally not be linked to Barack Obama. -- Innocent bystander (talk) 19:18, 21 May 2015 (UTC)
@Innocent bystander: Thank you for the informative and polite answer, and for not telling me no one cares about my contributions. It's much appreciated. As it is, I will just do what I think makes sense and not interact with other uses. First time I screw up and get yelled at, I'll be gone. Thanks again. Shinyang-i (talk) 19:42, 21 May 2015 (UTC)
Hi @Shinyang-i: :) I'm a bit late to the discussion, so I hope you're still around.
I think you have a very good question. The impression I get from both Help:Aliases and the prominence of aliases in the interface is that aliases are only designed for commonly used things which could be considered alternative labels, yet the impression I get from quite a few users is that aliases are just a place to put as many hints for the search as you feel like adding. Those are actually two separate concepts, so it's not a surprise to me that people are disagreeing.
I think that if aliases are not actually important, are just hints for the search and are not really of interest to humans, they should be made a lot less prominent in the interface. When the aliases take up so much space on the screen (above all of the interesting data even!), a direct consequence of too many aliases is that it makes the site harder to use: They get in the way of viewing and editing statements and they make editing labels slower.
If aliases are supposed to be alternate labels which are of interest to humans, then there is the question of how people can add data which is only for helping the search.
Either way, Help:Aliases does not seem to match how many people are currently using the field, which is a problem, because it will lead to more scenarios like this one.
- Nikki (talk) 01:17, 22 May 2015 (UTC)
Hi Shinyang-i. Welcome to Wikidata. You mention you have been looking at Korean and English language labels and aliases so you are familiar with the labels in other languages. If you have a Babel Box on your home page then that can help control which other language labels you see. See User_language for details. Feel free to drop by my page if you have questions you don't feel comfortable about asking here. Hope this helps. Filceolaire (talk) 06:09, 22 May 2015 (UTC)


Time to ping @Denny: here :) And also some of the major writer of Help:aliases, @Thepwnco, Sven Manguard, Bene*: (from the numbers on this history, who else ? ) to check community consensus. TomT0m (talk) 06:23, 22 May 2015 (UTC)

@Shinyang-i: Sorry for the not so great experience you had so far with the project. I hope it will get better. I usually have a really fun time on Wikidata. Thanks, TomT0m for pinging me in. Aliases were designed to support the search, this is also the reason why they don't have qualifiers and references, e.g. "Pope Francis" would be a good alias for "Francis" and the other way around, when referring to the current pope. It is merely meant as a technicality to help people find entities easier. They should not be considered to be a proper part of the knowledge base, but more meta-data about the topic that helps with searching.

Ideally search should get better over time with new software features. Romanizations or other transliterations, fuzzy, soundex-like search terms, etc. should automatically be created and enrich the search for entities, as well as some of the monolingual properties, like ISO codes, etc., translations, etc. But we are unfortunately not there yet. This would make great volunteer contributions, or summer of code-like projects!

I would, in general, try to use common sense in the absence of data. The more prominent a topic, the more care we should give to make sure it is found. The UI is indeed a bit misleading (also, I never been entirely happy with the "also known as" wording). But also less prominent topics deserve to be treated with the Aliases that will help surfacing them. Basically what I do is when I use Wikidata, and something does not show up with the search term I have used when I expected it, I go and add it. It would be great if we could actually gather the data and see where we are missing out: what are the search terms that do not deliver even though we could? @Lydia Pintscher (WMDE):, any chance of getting that data? This would allow us to make further rational decisions on the usage of aliases. --Denny (talk) 18:08, 22 May 2015 (UTC)

These are all very interesting points, @Denny, Filceolaire, Nikki:. I appreciate the response. I'm starting to run into situations like this one: Jung Eun-ji - and that's not even a quarter of the common romanizations for that name ('Chung' and 'Cheong' are also common spellings for that surname, plus the word orders all need to be reversed for Western style). It's hard to pick out which ones users are most likely to search, so I've been adding tons of them. But then, as already noted, you get a page dominated by alternative spellings, completely dwarfing the "good stuff". I'm interested in the efforts to program in fuzzy spellings and such. I can attest that whatever Google does, it works well for Korean. Even Ebay is pretty good with alternative romanizations. I'd be willing to help with such a project however I can. Meanwhile, I may lay off on adding a gazillion alternate spellings and stick with a few basics, plus actual aliases, and focus more on adding descriptions and such, since it seems maybe there will be some evolution in intent and functionality of the alias area. Thanks for all the feedback. This is all a lot of food for thought. :)
Mmmm while I'm here, can I ask another little question? I'm working with singer-related items, and it appears that the way to list band members on a band's item is to use the "has part" property. The reciprocal of that is "part of", but there is also a "member of" property. Which of the latter two is appropriate for a band member's item to designate their membership in a band, for consistency's sake? If anyone knows... :) Thanks! Shinyang-i (talk) 21:26, 22 May 2015 (UTC)
Looking at Wikidata:WikiProject Music, it seems like the suggestions there are member of (P463) for bands and part of (P361) for things like "Person 1 & Person 2" duos. - Nikki (talk) 01:41, 23 May 2015 (UTC)

  WikiProject Music has more than 50 participants and couldn't be pinged. Please post on the WikiProject's talk page instead.

Very helpful link, @Nikki:. Thank you! Shinyang-i (talk) 05:07, 23 May 2015 (UTC)
Aliases is partly of work around for cross language searching, partly for fuzzy searching. I've always wondered if the search result should include other languages, or whether that would clutter the search result to much. It could be done by raking close languages higher than the more distant, transliterated strings even less, and then duplicates should be removed. We could then reuse both labels and aliases from other languages to broaden the search, thereby increasing the chance for a useful result. Jeblad (talk) 16:25, 24 May 2015 (UTC)

@Shinyang-i:, an answer to one unanswered question: all capitalization matters (btb=/=Btb), so you should write John, but musician. --Infovarius (talk) 10:01, 29 May 2015 (UTC)

'Label list' for IP users

How can a user, who is not logged in, see a list of all the labels, descriptions and aliases, in every applicable language, for an item? – The preceding unsigned comment was added by Pigsonthewing (talk • contribs).

AFIK You can not use certain userscripts when logged out. --Giftzwerg 88 (talk) 05:29, 23 June 2015 (UTC)

feature request

Do not know where to do so: What do you think of feature, if new item is created systems gives me after adding first statement, fe. is a book, easy to add other statements via one click (they appear as grey boxes down there). So I can fill easy things need to be filled for a book. Btw: Is Phab also for this? Thank you, Conny (talk) 09:08, 29 May 2015 (UTC).

I asked here for more easy integration, too. Conny (talk) 09:09, 29 May 2015 (UTC).

To some extent it works like this. If you add P31:Q5, it suggests P21. That doesn't work for values though. It could suggest male or female, etc.
It also works for qualifiers, although you need to save your statement first without a qualifier (maybe this is a bug).
If you want a more dedicated interface, try WE-Framework#FRBR_Work_Editor. --- Jura 10:07, 29 May 2015 (UTC)
Actually, you seem to want to copy over Worldcat .. well, you can just add an identifier for a work and then people can read more about it there. --- Jura 10:10, 29 May 2015 (UTC)
Thank you for the hint with editor, I'll try. Conny (talk) 10:16, 29 May 2015 (UTC).

Internal Wikidata note appearing at top of article in Wikipedia Android app

I just noticed that if you view [6] on the mobile app for Wikipedia for Android - but not if you view it in an ordinary web browser - the description from Wikidata for the Twin item is shown at the top of the page. This would not be such a problem were it not for the fact that the description includes an internal note only meant to be read by Wikidata editors - "Use with P31 on items for one twin".

I suggest that there should be a separate property for such internal notes, if there isn't already, to avoid confusing readers of the mobile app for Wikipedia.--Greenrd (talk) 11:25, 29 May 2015 (UTC)

There is some discussion about this problem in phab:T97566. I agree that a new property would be a sensible option, although I expect that the website would need to make use of it before people would actually stop putting usage notes in the item description. - Nikki (talk) 12:00, 29 May 2015 (UTC)

Art people!

Should Portrait of a Stout Man (Q18508785) and Portrait of a Fat Man (Q18689079) be merged? --Magnus Manske (talk) 12:57, 29 May 2015 (UTC)

That seems like two different paintings, as can be seen in Commons:Category:Portrait of a Fat Man by Campin - 2 versions (Gemäldegalerie Berlin and Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza Madrid) (hairstyle is a bit different). --Zolo (talk) 13:28, 29 May 2015 (UTC)

Shared articles of two Wikipedias

How can I figure out, how many items have an article in both German Wikipedia (Q48183) and French Wikipedia (Q8447)?--Kopiersperre (talk) 15:18, 29 May 2015 (UTC)

674,932 [1] but that are not only articles but all kind of pages. --Pasleim (talk) 15:23, 29 May 2015 (UTC)
Or with Autolist (676,093). If you want to limit it to people, add and claim[31:5] (180,518). --- Jura 15:33, 29 May 2015 (UTC)
Thanks--Kopiersperre (talk) 15:56, 29 May 2015 (UTC)

Q17403220 - Doctorate Honoris Clausa

Hello,

Would someone have the skill to clean items related to Honoris Clausa. There seems to be quite a mess between honorary doctorate (Q11415564), honorary doctorate (Q17403220) and honorary degree (Q209896). I tried to do so but do have trouble handling it. I think that they could be easily cleaned and merged but they are used in claims. So I do not want to change anything without knowing the impacts.

Thanks in advance. Thieol (talk) 00:59, 30 May 2015 (UTC)

Items for Wikisource

We have Q19063070 which is a document about a chap called James Green, but he also has an item at Q6134904. Can we not just have one item for him, and link all these together in the sitelinks? If this is not possible, then what should the label and description be for the Wikisource item? MSGJ (talk) 08:22, 22 May 2015 (UTC)

These items should be/could be linked together, but not necessarily by the site-project links. If one items is about a person, and another about an encyclopeadic article about that person, it's not the same thing, but they can be linked. This is pretty much analoge to the problems I brought up earlier this week on Wikinews. A news article about a person is not the same as that person, and should have different Q-items in Wikidata that are linked. Edoderoo (talk) 11:23, 22 May 2015 (UTC)
Vlsergey: thanks for your detailed answer. I have a few comments / suggestions:
  • Is this "convention" documented anywhere? It is official?
  • I have relabelled a few of these by hand. Perhaps you could look at my recent contributions and tell me if they look okay?
  • I think it is the responsibility of those creating / importing items to do so correctly, and to make sure they have a proper label and description. The current arrangement is polluting the database making it hard to find other items.
  • Would it be a good task for a bot to relabel all of these items accordingly?
MSGJ (talk) 11:31, 22 May 2015 (UTC)
@MSGJ: 1. this convention is not documented yet, it's only implemented in some JavaScript code used by ruwiki and ruwikisource. We are expecting the formal process of discussion to start after arbitrary access is enabled on ruwiki & ruwikisource, because we will need bot work to handle ~300k links like above. 2. Actually, title of item in Wikidata doesn't matter a lot. Current labels looks good (and correct according to convntions above), but the most important point that we have prefix ("DNB00" or "DNB12"). Thus noone will made a mistake linking those items instead of original topics items. 3. Well, may be. But my bot is blocked :-) I assume one need to make those conventions "official", find some consensus among all users of Wikidata, may be open some RFC, after this bot can do his work. -- VlSergey (gab) 11:39, 22 May 2015 (UTC)

Why:

and not:

which seems more precise? Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 20:26, 22 May 2015 (UTC)

    • @Pigsonthewing: the reason behind this is simplification for bot, LUA and template processing. When we need article from, for example, DNB00, we looking for statement with described by source (P1343) value of DNB00 and extract link to article from stated in (P248). Second reason if unification of described by source (P1343) values, both for encyclopedias present in wikisource and ones that doesn't: all of those will have encyclopedias Q-item in described by source (P1343) field. Also, "precise" is not an argument here. Precise item is specified as qualifier:
  • To make this easy to handle, a solution that doesn't require the use of qualifiers would be helpful.
    The problem with the second approach with P|1343 is that it mixes DNB with any other resource that happens to be at Wikisource.
    Both approaches don't make it easy to find DNB merely because it has the disadavantage of being at WikiSource. --- Jura 06:13, 23 May 2015 (UTC)

Eurovision Song Contest 2015

How do we take care about the songs which will be performed today in the finals and how do we denote that a song didn't make it to the finals even though it competed in the semi finals? --Jobu0101 (talk) 16:09, 23 May 2015 (UTC)

As far as I can see we don't. See Q15953308 for example. Last years Belgian entry. Song didn't make it to the final, but that isn't denoted in the item. Mbch331 (talk) 16:24, 23 May 2015 (UTC)
I think all the tables which exist in the Wikipedias concerning the ESC should be creatable using only Wikidata. So we need appropriate properties. In particular Wikidata should know which songs competed and how they performed. --Jobu0101 (talk) 17:45, 23 May 2015 (UTC)
@Jobu0101: What extra properties do you think we need? Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 18:11, 23 May 2015 (UTC)
I added the points for the final. For the semi final results, I think we should create sepearte items for each show. --Pasleim (talk) 09:30, 24 May 2015 (UTC)

I think, also the songs should be linked somehow. But it's already a good basis what Pasleim did. --Jobu0101 (talk) 14:41, 24 May 2015 (UTC)

Eurovision Song Contest 2015 (Q15215081) has some good stuff. My suggestions:
  • We should have a separate item for each of the two semi-finals.
  • The 'participant' statements should link to songs, not to singers. Remember that the winning songwriters get invited on stage too at the end (at least they used to - Didn't see them this year).
  • Statements re singers/songwriters etc. for each song should go on the item for the song.
  • "country', 'ranking' and 'number of points/goals scored' are the appropriate qualifiers for the participants.
  • we can add a winner (P1346) statement. The semifinals can each have 10 winners (i.e. songs that went through to the finals).
This does raise a question about the item for the final. Can this also act as an item for the whole contest or do we need a separate item for that?
OK? Filceolaire (talk) 21:01, 24 May 2015 (UTC)
@Filceolaire: I totally agree on your points. Concerning your last question I think the correct way is to have a separate item for the final since the Eurovision Song Contest 2015 (Q15215081) is the union of all three shows and not only the final. Once we have worked out the Eurovision Song Contest 2015 (Q15215081) it can serve as show case for the other 59 ESC events. --Jobu0101 (talk) 08:30, 26 May 2015 (UTC)
I mostly agree with Filceolaire, some comments from me:
  • The primary statement for participant should not the performing artist as this is officially a song contest. Having the song as the primary statement seem like a good option.
  • While the songwriter and composer is permanent, the performer is interchangeable so it should be mentioned as a qualifier. At one point, Sweden's entries had three different interpreters, two in the national finals and another in the ESC. And of course, anyone can come along and record a song later on, so having to resolve who performed it a Eurovision could become unnecessarily complicated.
Väsk (talk) 10:03, 28 May 2015 (UTC)
@Väsk: @Jobu0101: @Filceolaire:, Regarding what Väsk pointed out, there's some comparison to this conversation and the one at the property proposal for Wikidata:Property_proposal/Creative_work#Recording_or_performance_of. There needs to be a distinction between a song "work" (the composition, with songwriter/composer) and the "recording or performance," by the recording or performing artist. Sweet kate (talk) 18:38, 29 May 2015 (UTC)
I know there have been discussions about "works" and "editions" related to books, one edition for every version of a book (paperback, e-book, Wikisource-online-version) and one main item about the work itself, related to the text. Maybe something like that have to be used here? Each "edition" can be related to different singers, or even different performances, when necessary. -- Innocent bystander (talk) 20:08, 29 May 2015 (UTC)

Link count ≠ article count?

Why is the link count of a language version (from autolist) much higher than the article count from en:List of Wikipedias?

per WDQ links[xy] per Special:Statistics
en 6151171 4880140
sv 2225481 1966516
de 2062441 1819316
nl 1927267 1822484
fr 1903803 1627748
ru 1498975 1224838
it 1465671 1201071
es 1405855 1177844
vi 1248844 1133345
pl 1236932 1114096
ja 1125782 968435
pt 1054782 875341
zh 1003540 821300
fa 751579 452288
uk 654814 571614

--Kopiersperre (talk) 19:04, 29 May 2015 (UTC)

Because Wikidata also connects categories and other pages outside the mainspace. Matěj Suchánek (talk) 19:20, 29 May 2015 (UTC)
Have a look at Wikidata:List_of_queries#Main_groups_of_items. About 25% of items are about categories and disambiguation. --- Jura 21:10, 29 May 2015 (UTC)

Please, long time request : when will we be able to add redirection pages to links ?

In wikisource, we often use disambiguation/redirection pages to store data from the work, and redirected pages for editions…

When there are more than one edition, the page is disambiguation, but as long as there is only 1 edition, we use a plain redirection, to spare the reader a clic :)

Now, to link with wikidata work and edition items, we have a problem…

This is problematic, since, when other editions will be added, it will be necessary to change wikidata fr link, just because of the fact that the redirection is not kept… 

I have seen many of them on wp, but I think those were created before the pages became redirections… and on ws, we have an automatic change of link when that happens…) :/

so, now, my question stands : when will we be able to add redirection pages to links ? pretty pretty pretty PLLLLEEEEEAAAAAAAAAASEEEEEEE --Hsarrazin (talk) 14:13, 23 May 2015 (UTC)

+1. @Denny, Lydia Pintscher (WMDE):, there was Wikidata:Requests for comment/A need for a resolution regarding article moves and redirects without a comment from developers... --Infovarius (talk) 11:04, 29 May 2015 (UTC)
I understand that this is an issue and that a lot of people care about it. I however also think it is not in the best interest of Wikidata itself to make this happen. (Sitelinks are a big part of defining what an item is about for example.) It is an issue because of the fuzzy concept linking on the other projects. Now that we're rolling out arbitrary access I want to see what people do with that to cater to that usecase. (There was already talking about this for example for Commons.) After some experimentation I want to reevaluate the next steps. --Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) (talk) 12:25, 29 May 2015 (UTC)
@Hsarrazin: technically you can add link to the redirect page. You need to create usual page (or change existing redirect to usual page), link it with wikidata entity and replace original page with redirect one. -- VlSergey (gab) 12:40, 29 May 2015 (UTC)
thanks Vlsergey, but no... on ws, we can't, please read above... --Hsarrazin (talk) 12:47, 29 May 2015 (UTC)
@Hsarrazin: still i don't get the problem. Currently Q19963040 is stated as edition of La lumière agonise et meurt à tes genoux (Q19965950). La lumière agonise et meurt à tes genoux (Q19965950) points to disambiguation and Q19963040 to specified element. Where do you want to insert additional element in terms of Wikidata? Do you want Q19963040 be edition of something and something to be edition of La lumière agonise et meurt à tes genoux (Q19965950), and something to point to redirect? Please, modify Wikidata elements accordingly and I will try to help create link to redirect in way you want. -- VlSergey (gab) 15:58, 29 May 2015 (UTC)
hello Vlsergey, - because of the homonymic pb, I made and error on the item number, sorry, because it surely did not help to understand.
but Q19963540 link points to the edition page, thus preventing the edition item Soir (Q20011072) to be linked correctly…
thanks for your help :) --Hsarrazin (talk) 18:59, 29 May 2015 (UTC)
PS : of course, these items are only examples, we have hundreds of those… :(
as a matter of fact, I've seen thousands of items where a link to a page showed the preview message "this page has been kept as a marker... to a potential future article" or something like that… the redirect works, but the link in wikidata stays, in these cases… how can it be obtained - is it something to do with __STATICREDIRECT__ that I don't know as a magic word ? or is it done with a template (on the target page, of course) ? :) --Hsarrazin (talk) 23:45, 29 May 2015 (UTC)
@Hsarrazin: i did the disable-redirect-magic-trick and created following sitelinks:
Q19963540 => https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Soir_-_%C2%AB_Les_flots_du_L%C3%A9th%C3%A9_coulent_sur_l%E2%80%99ardeur_vaine_%C2%BB
Soir (Q20011072) => https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/%C3%89vocations_(Vivien)/Soir
is this the way you want it to be? -- VlSergey (gab) 05:59, 30 May 2015 (UTC)
@Vlsergey:, yes, exactly :)) - now I see how you do it!!!! - brilliant, thank you so much :)) --Hsarrazin (talk) 13:22, 30 May 2015 (UTC)

@Hsarrazin: Stop redirecting in WS and done. If something is a Work, then redirecting to Edition is misleading in the first place. So, a misleading technique shall influence how Wikidata works? I vote: Oppose. Eldizzino (talk) 22:15, 29 May 2015 (UTC)

so, Eldizzino, do you tell me that redirections should not be used on wiki projects, because wikidata can't handle them ? do you really think it's a solution ? mwaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhaaaahhhhhhh --Hsarrazin (talk) 22:51, 29 May 2015 (UTC)

Disambigation links only managed in Wikipedia?

How to handle this ask for help? Thank you, Conny (talk) 19:36, 30 May 2015 (UTC).

Seems done. Conny (talk) 20:10, 30 May 2015 (UTC).

Wikidata weekly summary #160

Summer

We're only approaching summer in the Northern hemisphere; in the southern half of our planet, they're approaching winter. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 17:54, 31 May 2015 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #160

Summer

We're only approaching summer in the Northern hemisphere; in the southern half of our planet, they're approaching winter. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 17:54, 31 May 2015 (UTC)