Wikidata

Wikidata:Project chat/Archive/2017/03

< Wikidata:Project chat‎ | Archive‎ | 2017
This page is an archive. Please do not modify it. Use the current page, even to continue an old discussion.

IS there an AutoWikiBrowser equivalent for WikiData?

I come across a lot of items, such as the Kepler Planet Items and deide that they could each be described as an "extrasolar planet". However, there are like 200, maybe even 300 items for this, and it gets annoying. Is there like an equivalent of AutoWikiBrowser that will automaticaaly allow me to put the description "extrasolar planet" onto the item?  – The preceding unsigned comment was added by PokestarFan (talk • contribs) at 21:51, 28 February 2017‎ (UTC).

Quickstatements. You have to create a list of entries like 'QXXX TAB Den TAB "extrasolar planet"'. --Emijrp (talk) 22:01, 28 February 2017 (UTC)
@Emijrp This works, but I wonder if you know any other variants that can use a keyword to do it, because I typed in a huge range and it messed up some other items. PokestarFan (talk) 23:33, 28 February 2017 (UTC)
@PokestarFan: I see you're cleaning up your mess - I fixed one for you. You need to first get a reliable collection of QXXX's, you can't just assume that some range is what you're looking for. Start with the Query Service (link in the left navbar here) if you know at least something about the properties of the items you are looking for. ArthurPSmith (talk) 14:55, 1 March 2017 (UTC)
@ArthurPSmith: Thanks for the advice. I just queued around 1500 items.

Set of languages used when searching items/properties?

How can I define (by specifying a set of languages) which labels and aliases are searched when typing in the search field or a field that expects an item or property? I would specifically like to specify a set of more than one language (though I wouldn’t mind if the user-interface language were necessarily included in the set of searched languages). Thanks, BlaueBlüte (talk) 22:20, 28 February 2017 (UTC)

I don't think that's currently possible. I agree that it would be a nice feature. I personally sometimes want to search in German and sometimes in English and it would be nice if I could enter both. ChristianKl (talk) 09:36, 1 March 2017 (UTC)

P239 and P432 are different datatypes?

Why does ICAO airport code (P239) have datatype "String" but ICAO airline designator (P230) datatype "external identifier"? Surely they should be the same? Can we harmonize them without breaking things? Deryck Chan (talk) 14:54, 1 March 2017 (UTC)

they appear to be both "String" type - are you looking at something different? The discussion of why they didn't qualify as external id's is here. ArthurPSmith (talk) 15:07, 1 March 2017 (UTC)
My apologies. I mean why callsign of airline (P432) is "external identifier" but the two ICAO (and IATA as well) identifiers above aren't. I'm not sure why it needs to "resolve" to anything and be unique - IATA and ICAO codes move with airlines and airports as one gets succeeded by another in a continuous chain of succession. Deryck Chan (talk) 17:43, 1 March 2017 (UTC)

Requesting mass revert of Yash nagar’s defining formula statements

About 1½ months ago, Yash nagar mass-imported defining formula (P2534) statements from Wikipedia. Objections arose; many of the statements are incorrect, and in the end the user themselves agreed that the statements should be mass-reverted. Can someone please do that? Otherwise, I fear those incorrect statements will remain in Wikidata for a long time. (For example, I removed one just now where the formula only appeared in a reference at the end of the linked Wikipedia article.)

Pinging participants of the discussion on the user talk page: ArthurPSmith, Fnielsen, Vlsergey, Airon90, Infovarius. —Galaktos (talk) 14:27, 26 February 2017 (UTC)

@Galaktos: - Do we have a count of how many were imported? defining formula (P2534) has only been used 3,470 times so this wasn't a huge mass update (unless it's been fixed already?) A short list of ones still to fix is on the constraints page: Wikidata:Database reports/Constraint violations/P2534 so I think it might be better to clean up by hand rather than mass revert here. But if a mass revert is done (if it hasn't already been done) I'm ok with that too. ArthurPSmith (talk) 20:26, 27 February 2017 (UTC)
@ArthurPSmith: well, if a couple thousand statements aren’t “huge” or “mass”, then I just wasn’t aware of the usual scale those terms imply on Wikidata :) I think that was about the extent of statements that was added. But I do think a full revert of those statements (the ones added by Yash nagar via quickstatements – not all statements, if possible!) is in order, because many of the incorrect statements won’t show up on any constraints pages since they’re only logically wrong, not syntactically (example). Afterwards, the statements could be imported into the Primary Sources tool again, so that human editors can verify their correctness before adding them. —Galaktos (talk) 00:28, 28 February 2017 (UTC)
Some were fixed (about hundred by me, e.g.). I suppose that they should be removed from "Primary Sources" suggestions in order to not be added again. --Infovarius (talk) 20:59, 28 February 2017 (UTC)
No, the point of Primary Sources is that the statements are verified by a human before being added, which is exactly what’s needed here! Yash nagar just decided to sidestep this quality control. —Galaktos (talk) 19:30, 1 March 2017 (UTC)

It's correct instance of (P31)=free software AND copyright license (P275)?

There is a lot of item that have P31=software or sublass AND P31=free software AND copyright license (P275)=freesoftware license or subclass. I think that P31=free software must be deleted because we have a specific property for the license. Some opinion? We can delete it? 

SELECT ?item WHERE {
  ?item wdt:P31/wdt:P279* wd:Q7397. #subclass of software
  ?item wdt:P31 wd:Q341. #free software
  ?item wdt:P275/wdt:P279* wd:Q3943414. #subclass of free software license
}
Try it!

--ValterVB (talk) 17:01, 28 February 2017 (UTC)

Hi ValterVB, I tend to agree with you reasoning. There is some case where the licence of a software change (from non-free to free for instance) and it is much more simple to put the information only in copyright license (P275) and not duplicate it in instance of (P31). Cdlt, VIGNERON (talk) 20:10, 1 March 2017 (UTC)

Date formatting

Where do I localize the date and time formatting in the "point in time" datatype? Ideally I want to make one set of changes which will make both the Wikidata web interface and Wikidata calls from other Wikimedia projects in that language default to the same format. At the moment the formatting of dates in Cantonese is atrocious. Deryck Chan (talk) 11:25, 1 March 2017 (UTC)

(Cross-posted at Wikidata:Translators' noticeboard#Date formatting.) Matěj Suchánek (talk) 12:42, 2 March 2017 (UTC)

Curlie ID (P998) is about to go dark

Curlie ID (P998) refers to a dmoz ID but as announced today, DMOZ will be going offline in two weeks. The community there will fork but I'm not sure if 1.) we want to follow them with this property and 2.) if it's worth retaining DMOZ ids for historical purposes but removing the link functionality as the links will go down at the original source (although, again, they will be resurrected somewhere else). Thoughts? —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 01:05, 2 March 2017 (UTC)

There are lots of ID properties whose corresponding databases have not been updated in decades (as with NSDAP membership number (1925–1945) (P2298)) and yet we do not consider deleting them. dmoz should not be an exception to this trend, especially if adjusting links is a simple matter of changing formatter URL (P1630) to third-party formatter URL (P3303) on the property itself. Mahir256 (talk) 01:20, 2 March 2017 (UTC)
The Freebase-ID is a better example. About DMOZ: Maybe we could get a new property for the new DMOZ? Isn´t wikivoyage using dmoz quite a lot? But I do not know if they use Wikidata for those dmoz links. --Molarus 02:07, 2 March 2017 (UTC)
That depends whether the "new DMOZ" uses the same IDs as "old DMOZ". Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 15:43, 2 March 2017 (UTC)
We may be able to change the formatter URL to use archive.org Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 15:43, 2 March 2017 (UTC)

Contribute entity URI to Wikidata

I am writing from the National Library Board Singapore. We are currently maintaining a list of name authorities of Singapore entities (eg. people, organisations and places) in our own Knowledge Organisation System (KOS). Each name authority record contains attributes with information on the entity described, such as scope note, birth and death date, as well as variations of the preferred name in the official languages of English, Chinese, Malay and Tamil. The name authority record is represented by an unique URI to facilitate the exposure of our records in the linked data environment. We would like to find out:

  • How do we expose our record data through Wikidata to facilitate the development of linked data? Is it possible to provide only our name authority records URI and insert into the existing entities in Wikidata that match with our name authorities?
  • What is the process involved in contributing our record data to Wikidata?

 – The preceding unsigned comment was added by Nlbkos (talk • contribs) at 03:20, 2 March 2017‎ (UTC).

How wonderful that you consider both to connect your data to ours and are interested in sharing data as well. In my opinion there are several things we would like to consider
  • Linking; when you have an ID for the items in your database, we can include this in Wikidata. When people click on it they will go to your KOS.
  • Labels; it will be wonderful to ensure that we have labels in English, Chinese, Malay and Tamil. Importing them from your sources where we have none seems uncontroversial to me.
  • Data; there are three aspects
    • No data at Wikidata - after some discussion you may use a bot to import data to Wikidata where we have no data (for existing items)
    • Same data at Wikidata - it would be cool to use you as a reference so that we use your data as a source and are more confident that this data is indeed correct.
    • Differing data at Wikidata - This is where either our data or your data is problematic. We do not have a proper workflow for this. It would be cool to work one out.
Thanks, GerardM (talk) 06:46, 2 March 2017 (UTC)
As a practicality, something that would be useful to know is how co-referenced to other authorities your data already is -- eg VIAF, or other library systems. If you already have significant co-referencing this can greatly speed up the matching process. Jheald (talk) 09:23, 2 March 2017 (UTC)
@Nlbkos: Further to the above, it would be helpful if you could provide some sample URIs, so we can see how they, and your data, are structured. If you issue an identifier for each subject, we can create a property for it, like we have, for example, with GRID ID (P2427). I am happy to help you with the process of making a formal proposal for a property. Then, if you wish, you can provide us with a data file with those IDs (or URIs for them), and the other data fields you mention, and we can use our automated tools to either import your IDs correctly, or to provide a list for manual checking and addition. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 15:40, 2 March 2017 (UTC)

How to get dates with Lua

How to get the dates of the creation and last modification of an entity and its properties using Lua? Thanks for you answer. --RolandUnger (talk) 07:33, 2 March 2017 (UTC)

Reading this documentation makes me sure this is impossible. However, you could get the date of last modification of an entity with frame:preprocess( '{{REVISIONTIMESTAMP:Q123}}' ) where Q123 can be replaced with the appropriate id but this will only work on Wikidata, not any another wiki. Matěj Suchánek (talk) 12:40, 2 March 2017 (UTC)

Use of applies to part (P518)

Hi all,

We have a serious discussion about the use of applies to part (P518) with demonym (P1549) to indicate plural especially. It's about logic. Can some people help us for this thorny issue?

Thank you! Tubezlob (🙋) 11:15, 2 March 2017 (UTC)

Protect Carolina Sanín (Q5753276)

Hello, I don't know if this is the right place to request a protection, but the page Carolina Sanín (Q5753276) is being attacked by several of users just now. Can an admin please protect the page? Thanks in advance. --Mel 23 (talk) 04:19, 7 March 2017 (UTC)

@Mel 23: Trasladé su petición aquí. Mahir256 (talk) 07:26, 7 March 2017 (UTC)
@Mel 23: , protected for 2 weeks due to excessive IP vandalism.-- Hakan·IST 07:30, 7 March 2017 (UTC)
This section was archived on a request by: Matěj Suchánek (talk) 14:53, 8 March 2017 (UTC)

Can petscan be used to add descriptions?

MechQuester (talk) 19:55, 28 February 2017 (UTC)

No. But you can create lists of items without descriptions by using PetScan and add the descriptions using QuickStatements. Stryn (talk) 20:18, 28 February 2017 (UTC)
@Stryn:, Quick statements can add descriptions? My query was way too large for Descriptioner. MechQuester (talk) 03:42, 3 March 2017 (UTC)

P31 Item for a proposed state

Hi, I found Q716489, the item for the proposed Republic of Taiwan, which doesn't have a P31 statement. I entered the Q1145276 item, fictional country, but I think that applies to countries in works of fiction, rather than a proposed government. Is there a better item for the P31 property? Icebob99 (talk) 14:10, 1 March 2017 (UTC)

state with limited recognition (Q15634554) perhaps? K7L (talk) 14:34, 1 March 2017 (UTC)
It's not a great solution - state with limited recognition (Q15634554) implies it did exist in some form but wasn't accepted by the world, while in this case it never existed at all. Some similar cases, all entirely proposals with nothing on the ground:
None of these has a great P31, and most have none at all, except possibly Gorkhaland (Q260713) which is down as P31:proposed states and union territories of India (Q4808085). I wonder if this is the best way to go - create a "proposed country" item as a subclass of country & proposal, and work from there. Andrew Gray (talk) 20:41, 1 March 2017 (UTC)
@Andrew Gray: Or instance of (P31)micronation (Q188443), as there's already a Taiwanese example Taiwan Civil Government (Q17023229) existing? --Liuxinyu970226 (talk) 10:56, 2 March 2017 (UTC)
A micronation is a different thing - "an entity that claims to be an independent nation or state but is not recognized by world governments or major international organizations". So a small-scale case of state with limited recognition (Q15634554). Andrew Gray (talk) 12:18, 2 March 2017 (UTC)
Öland Municipality (Q10727246) was a proposed Swedish municipality. It was voted down in a local referendum in 2009. -- Innocent bystander (talk) 13:07, 2 March 2017 (UTC)
So should I create an item labeled "proposed state"? Icebob99 (talk) 14:13, 2 March 2017 (UTC)
I think that's the best approach - and here you go :-). proposed country (Q28864179), and the broader proposed administrative territorial entity (Q28864185) Andrew Gray (talk) 22:23, 2 March 2017 (UTC)

Overview #2 of updates on Wikimedia movement strategy process

Note: Apologies for cross-posting and sending in English. This message is available for translation on Meta-Wiki.

As we mentioned last month, the Wikimedia movement is beginning a movement-wide strategy discussion, a process which will run throughout 2017. This movement strategy discussion will focus on the future of our movement: where we want to go together, and what we want to achieve.

Regular updates are being sent to the Wikimedia-l mailing list, and posted on Meta-Wiki. Each month, we are sending overviews of these updates to this page as well. Sign up to receive future announcements and monthly highlights of strategy updates on your user talk page.

Here is a overview of the updates that have been sent since our message last month:

More information about the movement strategy is available on the Meta-Wiki 2017 Wikimedia movement strategy portal.

Posted by MediaWiki message delivery on behalf of the Wikimedia Foundation, 19:43, 9 March 2017 (UTC) • Please help translate to your language • Get help

Japanese speaker needed

Please can someone who can read Japanese take a look at Wikidata:Database reports/Constraint violations/P3703? In particular, is the property correctly used for companies, as well as people? Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 11:37, 27 February 2017 (UTC)

Looking. --Thibaut120094 (talk) 13:34, 27 February 2017 (UTC)
I can. ja:市川右太衛門 is an actor, while ja:市川右太衛門プロダクション is a production company. Syced (talk) 13:36, 27 February 2017 (UTC)
Pages that link to this property are overwhelmingly actors, but I have also found Q11466646 which is a production company. Syced (talk) 13:39, 27 February 2017 (UTC)
JMDB also have companies in their database, I'm fixing JMDb person or company ID (P3703) constraints. Apart of that, it's all fixed. --Thibaut120094 (talk) 13:43, 27 February 2017 (UTC)
Thank you. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 22:55, 27 February 2017 (UTC)
However, it is not a good idea to import values from {{jmdb name}} from jawiki en masse without checking first and understand Japanese, some of them are not about the subject of the article (example). --Thibaut120094 (talk) 13:54, 27 February 2017 (UTC)
http://www.jmdb.ne.jp/person/p0410410.htm is a JMDB item which is not a person, but rather a department of a company. Syced (talk) 13:52, 27 February 2017 (UTC)
I imported 1.7K values. We have 12 constraint violations, most apparently due to the constraint being too tight. I don't think that's unreasonable. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 22:55, 27 February 2017 (UTC)
If some aren't about the subject of the article that seems like a bad idea. ChristianKl (talk) 10:12, 28 February 2017 (UTC)
"If". Do you have any evidence of this happening, and can you quantify the problem? Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 10:17, 28 February 2017 (UTC)
@Thibaut120094: said that it's true for some of them and pointed out an example. ChristianKl (talk) 13:54, 28 February 2017 (UTC)
Indeed, but I asked for evidence and quantification, not anecdote. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 14:13, 28 February 2017 (UTC)
The fact that there's an example shows evidence. As far as quantification goes, I don't speak Japanese, so I can't help you there, but the person who does speak Japanese appearently thinks that there are enough items for which the import creates wrong data. In a case like this I don't think it's a good idea to import the data without being able to read the content. ChristianKl (talk) 09:46, 1 March 2017 (UTC)
The claim for which I asked for evidence was "some", not "a". Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 17:10, 2 March 2017 (UTC)
Andy Mabbett:If you create me a wiki page containing the list of 1700 Japanese labels, I can quickly delete everything that does not sound like a person name from that list. Cheers! Syced (talk) 03:22, 3 March 2017 (UTC)
Thank you, but as discussed above, it appears that these IDs are for people or organisations. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 12:03, 3 March 2017 (UTC)

What property to use for the educational institution that receives a thesis

I will soon do a bulk upload of doctoral thesis (Q187685) data from the University of Oxford. One thing I'm not sure is how to indicate the relationship between the thesis and the host institution. None of the doctoral theses presently have this property. For example, Ronald Hutton (Q3087695) got a Doctor of Philosophy (Q752297) by submitting a doctoral thesis (Q187685) to University of Oxford (Q34433). What property can I put in the record about the thesis to indicate its connection to University of Oxford (Q34433)? I'm not happy with publisher (P123) because the university might not publish the thesis: they might just keep a copy in their library. Not all theses are published, and the publication and inception of a thesis are separate events. conferred by (P1027) does not seem appropriate because the institution confers the degree, not the thesis. affiliation (P1416) is a property of a person rather than a creative work. So I'm not sure if there's an existing property that suits, or a new property needs creating. Any suggestions welcome. MartinPoulter (talk) 16:14, 2 March 2017 (UTC)

Here's a query for all the properties currently used on thesis (Q1266946) tinyurl.com/hp6abtl, with example values.
It looks like publisher (P123) has been used 25 times; though the question is, as you point out, how seriously use of that property should be taken as an indication that the work has actually been "published" -- i.e. made available, so that anyone sufficiently motivated can secure a copy. (I'm not sure whether placing a work where it is openly available for photocopy counts as "publication"; it might, in a narrow legal copyright sense; but perhaps not in the more everyday use of the word).
The only other property that looks to have been used much is sponsor (P859) -- but I presume that means who paid for the work.
There's a handful of educated at (P69) but that certainly looks wrong. Jheald (talk) 17:52, 2 March 2017 (UTC)
I took a look at some examples where we have an OCLC number for the work, tinyurl.com/zs85w5n.
It looks as if WorldCat has a separate field for this, "Dissertation:" -- see eg [1], [2]; although for some entries the import of metadata seems to have gone a bit out of sync for some fields, eg: [3], [4].
So a specific new property "Dissertation for" might be a good idea. This allows a publisher to be recorded separately, if the dissertation was then published in book form. Jheald (talk) 18:13, 2 March 2017 (UTC)
I'd use affiliation (P1416), which can be repurposed if required. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 18:32, 2 March 2017 (UTC)
I was tempted by Andy's suggestion but I've decided to import thesis data now, and add institutional data when the property exists for it. So I've proposed a "dissertation for" property since Jheald makes a very good case. Cheers, MartinPoulter (talk) 11:08, 3 March 2017 (UTC)

Recommendation of using "item by title search"

A help page says:

  • The best way to see if Wikidata already has a page on the item you wish to add is to use the item by title search. A link to this search is on the sidebar navigation menu on the left of the screen. By default, it is the fifth link from the top, and is entitled "Item by title".

What's the purpose of this advice? Why is that search better than the default search on the right side of the screen? ChristianKl (talk) 08:33, 3 March 2017 (UTC)

@ChristianKl: I honestly do not know.

Image recognition app scans paintings to act like Shazam for art

This is interesting, and something we could emulate, given the amount of artworks on Wikidata and Commons:

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2123373-image-recognition-app-scans-paintings-to-act-like-shazam-for-art/

-- Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 11:34, 3 March 2017 (UTC)

Agreement to add scientific names of taxons as labels

I have a long-standing request at Wikidata:Bot requests#‎Taxon labels for a bot to add scientific names of taxons as labels. user:Succu has objected to this, while recently, his bot is doing exactly that. When I pointed out this apparent ambiguity, he claimed that it is "is adding labels in a few languages where there is agreement to do so" (my emboldening).

I have now asked him three times for details of such agreement(s), but I have yet to receive a straight answer (he tells me "Simply follow the discussions", "I did often enough. So it's meanwhile a little bit boring", and "Again: follow the links in this thread. There is no need to repeat it again and again.").

Does anyone know whether these agreements exist, who made them, what was actually agreed to, and where they are recorded?

Aside from this, it seems ludicrous to be using a bot to add a label like "Drusus sharrensis" to the relevant item in languages like Bulgarian, Latin, and Russian, while at the same time objecting to anyone else doing so in in, say, Catalan, Dutch, English, German, French, Italian, Spanish, or other western-alphabet languages. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 16:26, 23 February 2017 (UTC)

This is discussed for the 5th (?) time now... --Succu (talk) 16:33, 23 February 2017 (UTC)
That is neither an answer, nor a discussion Succu. I find that it is a reasonable question to be asked, reasonable to have a clear explanation and this is a reasonable place for a discussion if one believes that one is being fobbed off, or non-answered. [Such declinations border on passive-aggressive behaviour.] So to help us all out, please can we have a clear and concise instruction on the addition of scientific names as labels in all the languages. I see it is happening for 80+ languages for family name, so it seems reasonable that it happens for taxonomic names. Thanks.  — billinghurst sDrewth 01:33, 24 February 2017 (UTC)
I am not aware of any discussions on the subject, so for the that is the 1st one. So it seems to me that both Andy Mabbett and Succu agree that such edits are needed, I agree as well. So what is the issue? That Succu changed his mind without admitting it and now does not want to talk about it? As for adding scientific names to Cyrillic alphabet wikis: that seems to be correct if I do to ru:Оконные_мухи the scientific name uses Latin alphabet. --Jarekt (talk) 02:36, 24 February 2017 (UTC)
Agree with Jarekt, billinghurst and Andy. Very sensible to add Latin scientific names of taxons as labels to cover all languages; long past time that we stop tolerating deliberately unhelpful snark and call it out for what it is - a form of bullying. --Tagishsimon (talk) 11:11, 24 February 2017 (UTC)
ludicrous, fobbed of, passive-aggressive behaviour and bullying - Interesting „discussion“.
@Jarekt: The current agreement is Wikidata:Requests for comment/Automatic labelling. --Succu (talk) 11:20, 24 February 2017 (UTC)
Yup, ludicrous, fobbed of, passive-aggressive behaviour and bullying seems to be the consensus. Had you posted the link instead of the snark, we would not be having this side-discussion. Please learn from it. --Tagishsimon (talk) 11:36, 24 February 2017 (UTC)
I read the RfC as being generally supportive. Can you point us at any objections to the proposal? --Tagishsimon (talk) 11:39, 24 February 2017 (UTC)
?!? Wikidata:Bot requests#‎Taxon labels. --Succu (talk) 11:41, 24 February 2017 (UTC)
That RfC was mentioned in the bot-request discussion only in response to my question "Can you show a policy requiring us to obtain consensus from external [WMF] projects before editing here?" (after Succu asked if I had "reached an agreement with svwiwki, cebwiki, warwiki, viwiki or nlwiki" to make the proposed edits in Wikidata). My response then - that's 28 March 2016 - was "Nothing in that May 2013 RfC stops this proposal from continuing; and no policy was created by it", to which Succu did not reply further. Even if that historic RfC were still - or ever - relevant, it shows no consensus either way regarding taxon labels in Russian; and Bulgarian and Latin labels are not mentioned at all. Indeed, the only consensus for oppose was a single voice asking for a temporary hiatus on doing so for Swedish, until other editors were consulted. Succu's reliance on the RfC is bogus. He has been stonewalling the request for a bot for almost a year. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 11:48, 24 February 2017 (UTC)
At earlier discussions that RfC was accepted as a starting point. Meanwhile some bot owners added labels in selected languages, e. g. User:BotNinja for bg and ru. I simply added this task to my weekly bot run. Have a look at this discussion started on 18 November 2015 where more concerns are expressed. Your recent conclusion from a diff It appears that Succu now agrees that adding scientific names of taxons as labels is a good thing. is not correct. I never agreed that mass adding labels the way you proposed is a good thing. The wording of some users here is not acceptable, especially the one that insinuates a personality disorder (passive–aggressive behavior (Q1153809)). --Succu (talk) 18:57, 24 February 2017 (UTC)
Succu claimed "agreement" for adding labels in languages such as ru, bg & la. He refused my requests to cite such agreement, until in this discussion he cited them to an RfC where no such agreements exist. He now refers to "earlier discussions". Which ones? As for "Passive-aggressive behavior", it may be defined as "the indirect expression of hostility, such as through procrastination, stubbornness, sullen behavior, or deliberate or repeated failure to accomplish requested tasks for which one is (often explicitly) responsible". Others may judge the applicability of that, but it is distinct from "passive-aggressive personality disorder". By all means, though, Succu may take that matter to the administrator's noticeboard. But he should beware of boomerangs. To reiterate, the position of using a bot to add a label like "Drusus sharrensis" to the relevant item in languages like Bulgarian, Latin, and Russian, while at the same time objecting to anyone else doing so in in, say, Catalan, Dutch, English, German, French, Italian, Spanish, or other western-alphabet languages is ludicrous. It is also utterly untenable; and I note that Succu has made no plausible attempt to defend doing so. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 19:39, 24 February 2017 (UTC)
Hmm, one snippet of my statement has been taken out of context on how it was meant from local conversational English. Can we stop chewing on that bone? [If that could be easily excised from this conversation to bring it back to focus, I would do that.] I have apologised to Succu separately for how my comment was perceived. I am not about trying to win an argument with hostility or bullying behaviour.

I would like to see clear statements on what can be done, there is none as far as I can see, and it may be that it doesn't come from Andy or Succu, as this should be an agreed community position.  — billinghurst sDrewth 04:36, 26 February 2017 (UTC)

Succu has now given a substantially different, vague, and conflicting justification for his claim of "agreement", on the Bot Request page, and has indicated there that he is "not not willingly to answer in a thread full of insults" (presumably meaning this one). Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 22:51, 24 February 2017 (UTC)

Moving forwards

In the light of comments made here I propose shortly to get a bot, for items where instance of (P31)=taxon (Q16521), and where there is already a label one one or more languages, which is the same as the value of taxon name (P225), to copy the value of P225 to the label for the following languages:

en,de,fr,it,es,af,an,ast,bar,br,ca,co,cs,cy,da,de,eo,et,eu,fi,frp,fur,ga,gd,gl,gsw,hr,hu,ia,id,ie,is,io,kg,lb,li,lij,mg,min,ms,nap,nb,nds,nds-nl,nl,nn,nrm,oc,pcd,pl,pms,pt,pt-br,rm,ro,sc,scn,sco,sk,sl,sr-el,sv,sw,vec,vi,vls,vo,wa,wo,zu

(all of which use the western alphabet) where no label already exits in that language.

Thoughts on doing this for items without a label in any language?

@billinghurst, Jarekt, Tagishsimon: FYI. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 20:38, 28 February 2017 (UTC)

I don't enter bot requests particulars. I am more interested in setting clarity for where we add all labels per language, so it is broader than taxonomic. Where is that decision made, who makes the decision, how and where is that recorded. As I say on a reasonably regular basis, find that information so that one can follow the "rules" is hard.  — billinghurst sDrewth 22:05, 28 February 2017 (UTC)
It does seem unfortunate to be spamming so many languages with so much duplicate material.
Tracked in Phabricator
Task T154260
Tracked in Phabricator
Task T89213
There are a couple of tickets open -- one for WDQS, one for Wikidata iteself -- that consider adding identifying a "fallback default" label, to be available to be shown if no other was available. Similarly one might consider adding "language-independent" / "native language" as additional pseudo-languages for labels, that perhaps could always be shown in addition to the labels in the user's own preferred languages.
But I see the second bug has made no progress in 18 months, so maybe it is necessary to spam all the languages. Jheald (talk) 22:12, 28 February 2017 (UTC)
Whether you agree with it or not, please don't refer to good faith editing as "spamming". Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 22:16, 28 February 2017 (UTC)
No offence was intended. I am sorry if any was caused. Jheald (talk) 22:26, 28 February 2017 (UTC)
+1 to Jheald's suggestion. Walloping 80+ language labels for taxonomic names or family names or (whatever else fits this categorisation) is crude and ultimately ugly as other wikis come on line rather than a default language neutral name that appears in a typeahead list.  — billinghurst sDrewth 12:55, 1 March 2017 (UTC)
Yes, I have always supported having a single default label (for taxon names, books, movies, songs, etc) to be shown in every language rather than actually adding them eighty or a hundred and forty fold (or whatever). - Brya (talk) 11:28, 4 March 2017 (UTC)

Two points emerge:

  1. A "single default label" sounds lovely, but it's just a pipe-dream. There is no indication that such functionality will ever be delivered, let alone in the near or middle future
  2. If that is the way forward, why is Succu using a bot to add labels in multiple languages; and why his action acceptable, but this proposal not?

-- Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 11:56, 4 March 2017 (UTC)

Base pair?

Is base pair (Q145911)      and base pairing (Q21481789)      the same thing? The latter has only eswiki article which seems to be describing the same thing as the former. Is there any difference? Which one should be used as unit for genomes? Laboramus (talk) 23:25, 27 February 2017 (UTC)

Ugh no? Both read as nucleotides MechQuester (talk) 15:17, 28 February 2017 (UTC)
It seems the Spanish Wikipedia has two pages and it would need a Spanish speaker to sort it out. ChristianKl (talk) 09:52, 1 March 2017 (UTC)
I swapped the pages. w:es:Par de bases is about unit, and w:es:Apareamiento de bases is about interaction. Julián L. Páez (talk) 17:13, 4 March 2017 (UTC)

Quick deleting of needed WD items

@ValterVB: quickly deleted three hotels from Wikidata without any discussion or notice to us and without any checks, whether they are used in a wiki. Now we miss all the information on Wikivoyage and got broken listings in our current featured article of the month. I would kindly request to undelete the three items and not deleting such items in the future. Wikidata is the only way to share information and save information that are needed in all Wikivoyage language versions on a central place. If we can not save save our items on Wikidata then Wikidata is completely useless to us. -- DerFussi 06:58, 1 March 2017 (UTC)

I restored this one and can restore the other two if one gives me the links. However, this is a serious issue since it was indeed no way to know the info is user on the Wikivoyage. We (the Wikidata and the Wikivoyage communities) must think what would be the best way to mark these items as notable.--Ymblanter (talk) 08:20, 1 March 2017 (UTC)
It seems like we generally need a new feature to show when a Wikidata item is used in a Wikimedia project. Especially given the intention that we want Wikidata based list inside of Wikipedia. @Lea_Lacroix_(WMDE):. ChristianKl (talk) 09:40, 1 March 2017 (UTC)
Hello @DerFussi, Ymblanter, ChristianKl:
It is possible, by clicking "Page information" in the left column on an item page. Then, the section "page properties" contains a box "wiki subscribed to this entity" with the list of all the wikis that use this item. In the case of Volks Mehood Hotel (Q28075839) I find nothing, but here's an example. Lea Lacroix (WMDE) (talk) 09:55, 1 March 2017 (UTC)
Great, thanks Lea. Is there any way we can get read of this extra click (which is a significant burden for admin doing many deletions, myself included) and show directly on the page whether an item is in use?--Ymblanter (talk) 10:11, 1 March 2017 (UTC)
Unfortunately not because of performance reasons. This would become quite ugly for an item like human used many times on many wikis. --Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) (talk) 17:53, 1 March 2017 (UTC)
Oh, but Q64 has sitelinks. We do not delete items with sitelinks. I guess the whole thread is about items used in templates (in particular, Wikivoyage uses Wikidata extensively). I do not think the template usage shows in the information.--Ymblanter (talk) 10:14, 1 March 2017 (UTC)
I have restored the other two items and the Wikivoyage article. Now you can see on https://www.wikidata.org/w/index.php?title=Q28090550&action=info that the hotel item is used on dewikivoyage. --Pasleim (talk) 10:16, 1 March 2017 (UTC)
Thanks so much, for the quick reply and restoring it. I can imagine, it's a very touchy issue to separate such entries from simple advertising (do you have an advertising problem here?) - welcome to the Wikivoyage World. Maybe it's useful to have the usage information direct at the bottom of the item's page. Unfortunately this article is our featured article and the article has full Wikidata integration from infobox to every single listing. I even conntected the openstreet map entry with the hotel's wikidata item. Thanks to everybody here for resolving it quickly. -- DerFussi 10:32, 1 March 2017 (UTC)
"do you have an advertising problem here?" Depends on what you regard as a problem. There are advertising items to be deleted every day. There are much more items to be deleted because all thei sitelinks have been deleted (which would probably make the Wikidata item unused clutter) or because they are nonsense in the first place. --YMS (talk) 11:48, 2 March 2017 (UTC)
As far as the extraclick goes, featurewise it might be useful to add a confirmation dialog when deleting items that are actually used somewhere. ChristianKl (talk) 10:36, 1 March 2017 (UTC)
This is one possible option indeed.--Ymblanter (talk) 10:59, 1 March 2017 (UTC)
No need for a special confirmation dialog. Actually, the "Delete page" page already has several warnings on it (e.g. page is linked somewhere, page has a history of so many versions, ...). Simply adding another warning there ("page is used here:") should be enough. --YMS (talk) 11:48, 2 March 2017 (UTC)
Just to clarify some aspect about the deletion of the elements in general (IMHO):
* About "without any discussion or notice" : the number of deletion it's so high that it's impossible warning all the users, moreover most of the elements were created by BOT. It's more efficiente restore deleted item when some user ask the restore and show that the item is notable, in this case the restore is very fast.
* The task of search of item to delets is based a lot on SPARQL, we have a lot of list that show item that must be deleted, but normally the rules are based on notability policy: No sitelink, no backlink, no source/reference="No notable" (there are some exceptions that require more detailed controls). The control that I done on the item in thiese lists is about the possible elimination of sitelinks (page deleted?, page move to another item? vandalism? etc.)
  • To solve the problem highlighted in this topic we need that SPARQL can acces to the info "wiki subscribed to this entity" or alternatively need a template to add to the list, so in case a not notable item is "used" we can do a more complete check. If these solutions aren't possible we can create a new property "Item used in Wikiproject" or "Item used in wikipage" --ValterVB (talk) 12:41, 1 March 2017 (UTC)
  • I forgot to say that I exclude from delete process also item with property that are "External identifier" --ValterVB (talk) 12:47, 1 March 2017 (UTC)
    • @ValterVB: I really don't like the "oh, we're so busy" excuse. It's your responsibility as an administrator to check before deleting. Now that we know that the info is available we should check it before deleting something as out of scope. BTW, what is the API call to get this info? Bots and tools being used in the deletion process need that to check it. Multichill (talk) 21:15, 1 March 2017 (UTC)
I don't say "I'm so busy", but the problem is that not notable item increase more than we can delete. In a project like Wikidata rules on delete and on restore must be different than in Wikipedia, everything is much faster. We must use also automatic tools to do this kind of task, but if the opinion is that we must to do a much more thorough check I can report all this kind of item in Wikidata:RFD so more user can check this item. --ValterVB (talk) 21:41, 1 March 2017 (UTC)
I would prefer it if the items get listed in Wikidata:RFD with everyone who edited the item getting pinged and deleted after a week if nobody objects to their deletion.
At the same time it also makes sense to make the data accessible via SPARQL. Besides this usecase, it makes sense to be able to make a query like "hotels in Berlin that aren't listed in de.wikivoyage". ChristianKl (talk) 08:25, 3 March 2017 (UTC)
We already have a lot of report with candidate do delete, someone updated daily other base on SPARQL, we talk about thousand of item or maybe tens of thousands of items. Can we can add all this item in Wikidata:RFD? Based on my experience 90% of this item can be deleted without problem, 9% must be merged or must be restored to a previous state, 1% are problematic and a discussion in RFD is useful.

--ValterVB (talk) 10:20, 3 March 2017 (UTC)

  • If a new user get's an item deleted without notice that's demoralizing. I think it would be more friendly to new users to alert them that an item doesn't fulfill our standards and give them a change to improve it, the same way as Wikipedia does it.
Maybe we could put a deletion warning template of a talk page of a items that get flagged. A category page could list all items that currently have the deletion warning template. If the deletion warning template stays for a week, the item comes in your lists to be deleted. ChristianKl (talk) 12:07, 3 March 2017 (UTC)
This is not really possible unless done by bot. We have too many items for deletions and too few admins doing deletions on regular basis, so that alerting every user would severely disrupt the workflow.--Ymblanter (talk) 13:51, 3 March 2017 (UTC)
Is it possible to undelete Q27954647 (Hotel König), too? It was a hotel in the Vienna quarter of Simmering being the host of the 2017 hackathon. --RolandUnger (talk) 06:04, 2 March 2017 (UTC)
  Done--Ymblanter (talk) 06:40, 2 March 2017 (UTC)
Personally I have some doubt with this kind of item. In this case all the hotels are notable, simply add it into a wikivoyage page, use a property from wikidata and the item is automatically notable. Maybe we must think about this. With the same criterium "All can be notable"... --ValterVB (talk) 10:31, 3 March 2017 (UTC)
What's the practical issue here? Having items for Wikimedia lists is an useful task for Wikidata. ChristianKl (talk) 12:07, 3 March 2017 (UTC)
@ValterVB: you seem to be doing quite a bit of harm. user:Spinster is preparing an import and as preparation created Philomene Pirecki (Q28775124), François-Xavier Courrèges (Q28777061), Alison O'Daniel (Q28792361), Marie Voignier (Q28777080), Pierre Toby (Q28777002). You deleted them, she politely asked you to undelete. Now look at the red link, the second one was never undeleted and two others were deleted again on the same day. What are you doing? I think it might be better you take a break. Multichill (talk) 18:49, 3 March 2017 (UTC)
@Multichill: The second was an error, if user warned me I could undelete, for the third can happen if the people create item with only instance of (P31) =human (Q5) and sex or gender (P21), no sitelink no source, no something of useful in object, I restored you can see the statuss of this item. However, now I put all cancellations in RFD so other admin can decide. --ValterVB (talk) 19:37, 3 March 2017 (UTC)

Old Wikipedia article without a Wikidata link

I discovered that en:Airport Road (Ontario) does not have a Wikidata link (I will create it shortly). The article was created in 2015. I thought all new eligible Wikipedia pages eventually get picked up by bot, which presumably did not happen with this article. Does someone know more, e.g. (i) bots were not yet running at the time; (ii) I am wrong about bots at all; (iii) smth else happened?--Ymblanter (talk) 13:02, 4 March 2017 (UTC)

This was created in 2015 but until February 2017 it was a draft. Bots shouldn't create items for not yet complete articles. Matěj Suchánek (talk) 13:09, 4 March 2017 (UTC)
I see, thanks. This probably explains as well why there was no photo until today (when I was there two weeks ago, I discovered that and went to take a photo before catching my plane).--Ymblanter (talk) 13:26, 4 March 2017 (UTC)

Possible gatherings of the "Wikidata + GLAM" Community in 2017

Dear all,

The idea of ingesting heritage data into Wikidata on a large scale is getting more and more traction. To get an overview of what has already been done, have a look at WikiProject Cultural heritage. Several further projects are under way.

In 2017 members of the "Wikidata + GLAM" Community are planning to attend various international conferences and hackathons. I think it would be nice to have a couple of dedicated meet-ups where we can discuss hot issues related to Wikidata + GLAM, where we can exchange experiences, and where the non-initiated can meet those among us who have been sticking around on Wikidata for a while.

From a casual enquiry on the Wikidata + GLAM Facebook group I have gathered the following conferences/hackathons that might be of interest:

If you are interested in issues related to the ingestion of heritage data on Wikidata, please indicate which events you are planning to attend this year by filling in the following Doodle poll

If you are aware of any further events of relevance in this context, please let me know and I will add them to the poll.

--Beat Estermann (talk) 15:52, 4 March 2017 (UTC)

Documentation sprint for Wikidata during the Wikimedia Hackathon

Hello all,

As you know, the Wikimedia hackathon will take place on May 19-21 in Vienna.

During this event, we will organize a documentation sprint to help volunteers to improve the user-level documentation for Wikidata.

During these 3 days, you'll be able to join (IRL or remotely, at any moment) to work on improving and translating the help pages. We suggest a focus on these 3 topics:

We will also organize some workshops (translation tools, illustration...) to help you build a better documentation.

You will find all the information on the related page. If you're interested, feel free to add yourself in the attendees list.

We're now building a list of simple tasks that volunteers could work on during the event. If you have any ideas, parts of the documentation that should really be improved... feel free to add your ideas on the talk page, or if you feel comfortable with Phabricator, directly create subtasks of the tasks listed above.

Thanks a lot, and maybe see you there! Lea Lacroix (WMDE) (talk) 11:03, 2 March 2017 (UTC)

Why focus a Hackathon on improving documentation instead of focusing it on writing code? It seems to me like there are tasks for writing bots to import data that are simple enought o be a Hackathon task. ChristianKl (talk) 11:49, 2 March 2017 (UTC)
There will also be a lot of code-writing. But Léa is working on getting the documentation improved. Especially the installation instructions for Wikibase are a pre-requisite to actually being able to code on it. --Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) (talk) 16:20, 2 March 2017 (UTC)
I agree with ChristianKl. I applaud the effort of improve documentation, but I'm not sure this is the best way to spend our time on the hackathon.
As far as I know most of the Wikibase code is written by the staff of WMDE and apparently this is done in a very agile manner (working code is more important than documented code). If this is important, why aren't the people who actually write the code not spending more time on it? Now it feels a bit like the staff doesn't feel like doing it and it's up to the volunteers to do it. Multichill (talk) 22:03, 2 March 2017 (UTC)
More AGF please :) Staff will be taking part in it. But this is also not just about the tech documentation but also end-user documentation for example that is outside our mandate. We're constantly getting complaints that the documentation is bad. We're doing something about it. No-one is forced to join. There are enough people at the hackathon who are not developers to help with this without taking away from the rest of the event. --Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) (talk) 11:29, 3 March 2017 (UTC)
If the current end-user documentation is problematic, wouldn't it be more straightforward to have on-wiki a Wikiproject that deal with it? It might have a subpage that lists all complaints about the documentation. ChristianKl (talk) 12:41, 3 March 2017 (UTC)
The same could easily be said about code. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 18:35, 3 March 2017 (UTC)
The key venue to discuss code is phabricator. The key venue to discusses changes to the on-Wiki documentation is the Wiki. ChristianKl (talk) 05:49, 5 March 2017 (UTC)
Hi all. To copy what I wrote on one of the phab tasks [with tweaks and addendum]:
I think I understand [the concerns] (i.e. that developers should spend their valuable time together, working on the really hard problems, and not on writing beginner documentation), but if I may offer a few counterpoint thoughts:
  • These (3 documentation tasks) are all-day sessions, and are suitable for drop-in; so if an experienced dev wants to take a break from more complex code-oriented thinking, they can optionally do so here.
  • There are usually a small number of newcomer developers in attendance, plus a few experienced-editor non-developers. - These people will (a) be able to provide beginner-perspective insights (to the experienced developers) for why a documentation-change, or a feature-request, or an interface-design-change is desired, and (b) will be able to talk directly to experienced-developers in order to get technically-precise summaries, that they as newcomers/non-developers can then help to document, from a beginner's perspective.
  • Documentation problems are so common (throughout the world, not just software!) that they rarely even get discussed in detail. These sessions will give a space for spitballing (sharing/brainstorming/etc) our collective gripes and suggestions. Some of the people who are there, might be inspired to finally fix those longstanding problems! At the very least, a detailed to-do list or options-list can be written down [or added to, if we start it ahead of time, as ChristianKl wisely suggests], and then the gritty detailed work can be done at a slower pace when everyone is back home.
[Addendum] See also, some recent discussion on wikidata-l about these proposed tasks, where there is some interest, and some suggestions. I completely agree that we should start a WikiProject, or other organizing page, ahead of time. Is there an ideal existing location to use, or do we need to create a new page? (It's generally better to use existing pages when possible, otherwise everything fragments even further.) - I couldn't see anything, from a quick glance around, beyond the basics at Help talk:Contents.
HTH. Quiddity (talk) 18:48, 3 March 2017 (UTC)

Exchanging the order of "Sister Projects" and "WikiProjects" on the Wikidata Community Portal

I think it would be good if we exchange the order of "Sister Projects" and "WikiProjects" on https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Community_portal . It would make it easier for new users to discover that we have WikiProjects and engage with them. ChristianKl (talk) 12:21, 3 March 2017 (UTC)

Good idea.--Jklamo (talk) 10:31, 4 March 2017 (UTC)
  Support --Daniel Mietchen (talk) 23:20, 4 March 2017 (UTC)
  Support -- PokestarFan (talk) 01:51, 5 March 2017 (UTC)
I changed the order myself with an edit. It seems like the change doesn't propagate throught he translations. Is there some guideline how to do changes to pages like this? Can someone more experienced take a look at the change? ChristianKl (talk) 06:38, 5 March 2017 (UTC)

List of WikiProjects

How can I obtain a list of wikiprojects? PokestarFan (talk) 21:39, 3 March 2017 (UTC)

Are you talking about this list? -- Envlh (talk) 08:27, 4 March 2017 (UTC)
@Envlh: Yes, this is the list. Thank you. PokestarFan (talk) 01:50, 5 March 2017 (UTC)

ArticlePlaceholder extension

Can the ArticlePlaceholder extension be installed on the production instance of Wikidata? I think it would be great as a way for people to get some idea of how it works on Wikipedias which are testing it. (Especially great would be to see English language output, given the English Wikipedia doesn't have ArticlePlaceholder yet and is unlikely to ever do so – I can look at some of the non-English wikipedias that are testing it in production, but the experience is a bit lacking when I can't read those languages.) The "Create an article" button should be disabled of course. (Test Wikipedia and Test Wikidata have it, but they don't have real data – it would be great for people to be able to see it with real live data from here.) SJK (talk) 05:01, 5 March 2017 (UTC)

@SJK: There's no reason why testwiki: can't have legit articles. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 05:09, 5 March 2017 (UTC)
@Koavf: right now testwiki: is hooked up to the test Wikidata which has junk items instead of the real Wikidata, compare test wikipedia about Q12345 to Count von Count (Q12345). I think the developers don't want to use the real data on test instances because of the hassles involved: (1) the real data is a lot bigger than the test data; (2) if they were to use real data, they'd likely use a point-in-time snapshot rather than a live feed, but (3) a point-in-time snapshot might contain problematic material like defamation or doxxing, so they'd have to deal with requests to remove that from the test data post the snapshot time. So I see why fake data is easiest for them. But I think it would be best to install ArticlePlaceholder here so people can see how it works with real data even if they don't speak one of these minor languages it is being tested in production with. SJK (talk) 05:16, 5 March 2017 (UTC)
@SJK: That makes sense. I should have said earlier that I support your proposal as well. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 05:46, 5 March 2017 (UTC)

Active WikiProjects

How can I find wikiprojects that have edited in the last 7 days? all of the wikiprojects seem to have at most 9 members, and the last edit is at february. How can I find a wikiproject that has:

  1. A decent amount of members, and
  2. Been active within 7 days

PokestarFan (talk) 02:15, 5 March 2017 (UTC)

e.g.
Even on these rather large projects, I find it is hard to know what is happening right now and feel part of something. It would be more motivating to have a precise list of tasks, with some progress marker, and see the number of remaining items go down progressively (or up for good items!). Or at least, to have some people describe what they are doing so that others can come and help. Koxinga (talk) 09:25, 5 March 2017 (UTC)
Well, I think many projects are at about 1% of what could be done. So unless one is self-motivated, one might probably think we are nowhere. BTW Wikidata:Database_reports/without claims by site, Wikidata:Wikivoyage/Lists/Embassies and Wikidata:Database_reports/Deaths_at_Wikipedia attempt to do some progress calculation, but it's obviously somewhat one-dimensional.
--- Jura 09:50, 5 March 2017 (UTC)
Of course, most projects have a very large scope, but specific tasks can be done collaboratively and give a good result in a short time. For example, I like your embassy example and added a few informations. What would be even better is a history of the progress, even if just for an aggregated "completeness" indicator. Koxinga (talk) 21:55, 5 March 2017 (UTC)

Describing what a shop sells

Is there an appropriate way to define what types of products or services a shop sells? field of work (P101) is for people. industry (P452) seem too general. What I would like is a logical link to say that bakery (Q274393) sells bread (Q7802). Pauljmackay (talk) 07:51, 5 March 2017 (UTC)

For a bakery "product or material produced" would do, but this will not work for some other shops. - Brya (talk) 12:07, 5 March 2017 (UTC)
Yes I appreciate because a bakery makes produce on site that could work, but I'd like a means for any kind of shop. Pauljmackay (talk) 16:32, 5 March 2017 (UTC)

has characteristic (P1552)

The description for has characteristic (P1552) indicates that it should apply to non-material qualities, but I see uses that are clearly material. Is there a better property for material features? Or do we need to update the description? - PKM (talk) 23:31, 5 March 2017 (UTC)

dedicated to (P825)

Is it ok to use dedicated to (P825), when I want to say to which artist an art exhibition dedicated?--Stolbovsky (talk) 21:39, 1 March 2017 (UTC)

I spot-checked some single artist exhibits, and they use main subject (P921). I'd recommend that. - - PKM (talk) 02:54, 2 March 2017 (UTC)
@PKM: I don't think those are equivalent. "main subject" apparently refers to the topic or content (e.g. of the exhibition). What is used, for example, when a book or film is dedicated to an individual, who is likely not the work's "main subject"? -- Deborahjay (talk) 11:19, 5 March 2017 (UTC)
@Deborahjay:My understanding is the same as yours, I understood the original question to be what property to use for an exhibit "dedicated to the works of". - PKM (talk) 13:56, 5 March 2017 (UTC)
So how would we characterize a solo exhibition displaying portrait paintings by artist George W. Bush of US military veterans and dedicated "in honor of" the latter? -- Deborahjay (talk) 11:21, 6 March 2017 (UTC)

Mass deletion nominations

User:ValterVB is mass nominating thousands of items for deletion on Wikidata:Requests_for_deletions. I think there needs to be some community discussion about this. ValterVB's method appears to be simply applying mechanical criteria (such as a SPARQL query) and then nominating all the query results without giving any evidence of having reviewed them. The problem with that is twofold (1) it misapplies the notability policy, which can't be reduced to mechanical criteria (an item may well be notable even if it is near-empty and has no backlinks or sitelinks – if you can identify the concept it refers to, you need to do research to try to determine if sufficient sources exist for it to be notable, and if you can find such sources then obviously it is notable despite the poor state of the item – the answer then is to try to improve the item rather than delete it) and (2) I feel like this overloads the ability of the community to review all the nominations. I think a lot of stuff ValterVB has nominated is actually notable and should be kept but I don't have the time to go through every one and check for valid arguments for notability. I think there should be a policy against mass nominations of this nature. (Mass nomination might be acceptable if it is items in one confined area meeting precise criteria, but not with the broad criteria ValterVB is using.) SJK (talk) 02:13, 4 March 2017 (UTC)

All items ValterVB nominated for deletion have neither references nor sitelinks nor backlinks. How can such an item represent a clearly identifiable entity? --Pasleim (talk) 02:55, 4 March 2017 (UTC)
Pasleim, that is easy. Consider one of the items ValterVB nominated – US pregnancy category A (Q28123615) – can there be any doubt that item refers to a clearly identifiable entity? In very many cases, the labels and descriptions (in conjunction with the instance of) are sufficient for an intelligent person to identify uniquely which concept in reality the item is referring to, and hence make a judgement – after researching the item (e.g. search Wikipedias, search Google, search specialised sources such as Google Scholar, Google Books, research databases such as JSTOR, etc) – make an informed judgement on whether the referred to concept is likely to be notable. But ValterVB shows no sign of having done this – just ran some queries and nominated everything the query returns without thought. The notability policy can't be reduced to such a mechanical process. SJK (talk) 04:13, 4 March 2017 (UTC)
These items seem to be linked to the unused property pregnancy category (P3489). Probably that should be deleted as well if no use can be found for it.
If the property was put to use, I don't think these would have shown up.
--- Jura 11:24, 4 March 2017 (UTC)
The reason the property hasn't been put to use yet is I haven't worked out an easy way to export the data from English Wikipedia (where this is stored in a template) into Wikidata. I looked at using Petscan but couldn't quite work it out. Maybe I will write some code but have been too busy. SJK (talk) 11:38, 4 March 2017 (UTC)
Actually I was looking at using Harvest Templates but there isn't any way in that to provide a mapping from strings to items... it just wants to import string properties. Whereas I think the property works better as an item, which is why I created these items. Actually, now I am working on some scripts to try to do this. SJK (talk) 12:02, 4 March 2017 (UTC)
Here we have a lot of user that can do "miracles" with BOT. Probably if you use this page you can found someone that can do the task in correct way. --ValterVB (talk) 12:38, 4 March 2017 (UTC)
@SJK: I'm indeed doubting that US pregnancy category A (Q28123615) refers to a clearly identifiable concept. FDA changed their pregnancy categories in 2014. Does US pregnancy category A (Q28123615) refer to the pre or post 2014 category system? Nobody can know it. So nobody can improve it. Adding a single reference to a document could be so easy and could save so much trouble... --Pasleim (talk) 13:14, 4 March 2017 (UTC)
@Pasleim:–it is easy to know – letter categories don't exist in the post-2014 US system, they have been replaced by descriptive text, so obviously any US letter category is part of the pre-2014 system. If you would google the topic you would find this out quickly–among other sources, the English Wikipedia article on pregnancy categories explains it. Yes, references would be great, but if one doesn't know what something is google the label and spend some time studying the Google results and in many cases (such as this one) it will be very clear. But if a person nominates things for deletion based on results of a query instead of spending the time to research the item themselves that just means other people have to do that research for them. It is a failure to do due diligence before nominating. SJK (talk) 13:22, 4 March 2017 (UTC)
Please don;t confuse clearly identifiable with clearly identified. Despite the unique interface, this is still a wiki, and we work by incremantal mporvement. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 11:26, 4 March 2017 (UTC)
@SJK:It's worth noting that till the deletion of items like this would have been happening without any nomination discussion. I think the process of having the nomination out in the open with users being able to comment is an improvement. ChristianKl (talk) 14:01, 4 March 2017 (UTC)
ChristianKl If you look at how English Wikipedia handles it (and I imagine other language Wikipedias do similar, but am not familiar with them), they have a gradation of different processes (1) speedy deletion (for most blatantly obvious cases – admins can do this on their own accord, but there is a process by which non-admins can flag pages for an admin to consider) (2) PRODing (for undisputed low controversy stuff that isn't blatantly obvious), (3) AFD (for disputed / high controversy stuff). I really think Wikidata could do well by adopting some more structure in deletion like that. Another good thing enwiki does is standard deletion reason codes admins have to use when deleting something without discussion in the edit summary. Having more structure and more transparency would be good, because this makes me worry that a lot of stuff is getting deleted when if someone made the effort it might be salvageable. SJK (talk) 14:07, 4 March 2017 (UTC)
I agree with your core concern. I think this particular Mass deletion nominations is a change towards more transparency in our process and thus I feel like ValterVB shouldn't be too strongly criticized for it.
I agree that standard deletion reason codes would be great (it would also be useful to make the label of a property still visible after the deletion of that property. ChristianKl (talk) 14:17, 4 March 2017 (UTC)
deletion is not a quality improvement process. better to talk to item creator and solve problems. mass deletion is particularly bitey. Slowking4 (talk) 09:33, 5 March 2017 (UTC)
  • If we stay with a automated deletion nomination process like this, it would be good to use the item template {{Q|...}} instead of the plain number. It might also be nice to have a bot that automatically flags items that did get links after the item was nominated, so that it get's clear that the item has been improved and doesn't need to be deleted. ChristianKl (talk) 09:03, 6 March 2017 (UTC)

Case-sensitive

The problem: Q2502275 (Ury) vs. Q406167 (URY). Why can't Wikidata distinguish between uppercase and lowercase? --Harry Canyon (talk) 05:50, 5 March 2017 (UTC)

What do you mean with the suggestion that Wikidata can't distinguish between the two? ChristianKl (talk) 05:58, 5 March 2017 (UTC)
@ChristianKl: Sorry, wrong item, I mean Q2502275 (Ury) vs. Q406167 (URY). Both can not be provided with the description "Wikimedia disambiguation page". --Harry Canyon (talk) 06:04, 5 March 2017 (UTC)
You can give on the description "Wikimedia disambiguation page for lower case" and the other "Wikimedia disambiguation page for upper case". ChristianKl (talk) 07:17, 5 March 2017 (UTC)
This is just a makeshift solution and does not really solve the problem. It would be better, Wikidata could differ between upper-case and lower-case, as is also Wikipedia. --Harry Canyon (talk) 08:56, 5 March 2017 (UTC)
I think these items should be merged. Pages like de:Ury, it:URY and fr:URY refer to both "Ury" and "URY" so making a distinction between these two concepts on Wikidata is pointless. The only conflict is enwiki but the articles en:Ury and en:URY (disambiguation) are obivous dublicated pages because they both refer to "Ury". --Pasleim (talk) 09:12, 5 March 2017 (UTC)
At the beginning Wikidata was case sensitive, then developer have changed without a clear explanation. However, it's possible to bypass this constraint --ValterVB (talk) 17:01, 5 March 2017 (UTC)
Probably, there are still a lot of items that violate this rule because when they have changed this, they did not bother to provide lists of items that violate the rule or a tool to control them. This is also the reason why sometimes the merge does not work --ValterVB (talk) 17:06, 5 March 2017 (UTC)
I've merged the en.Wikipedia pages. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 11:12, 6 March 2017 (UTC)

Current property deletion requests

At the head of my watchlist there's a couple of items,

  • Selected requests for comment
  • Current property deletion requests
  • Current property proposals

The list of current property deletion requests includes BBC News Democracy Live ID which was raised last October, resolved in November, and archived in December. It's not been a live discussion for 3 months. Why's it still listed as a current request? Cabayi (talk) 12:17, 5 March 2017 (UTC)

The list needs to be updated by hand. I have just done it, so there should be shown only relevant links now. Matěj Suchánek (talk) 13:00, 5 March 2017 (UTC)
Matěj Suchánek, Thanks, Cabayi (talk) 13:11, 5 March 2017 (UTC)
Matěj Suchánek, the links only work if the discussion's section header is in a specific format, which many aren't - and if the discussion covers more than one property, can't be.
doesn't link to Wikidata:PFD#Property:P3122, and
& can't link to Wikidata:PFD#doubles record (P555) and singles record (P564).
There's a bigger fix needed. Cabayi (talk) 13:27, 5 March 2017 (UTC)
It shouldn't prevent you from finding the request and/or to contribute to Wikidata.
--- Jura 13:31, 5 March 2017 (UTC)
Jura, that's a poor reason to leave the problem unfixed. Cabayi (talk) 07:40, 6 March 2017 (UTC)
Matěj Suchánek, embedding an {{Anchor}} (with the Property's # rather than its label) in {{Rfd links}}, and pointing {{PropertyRFD}} at the anchor rather than a potentially incorrect title would provide a more reliable deep link into Wikidata:PFD. My 2¢. Cabayi (talk) 08:47, 6 March 2017 (UTC)
What you suggest is nice and actually simple. I think I'll do it. Matěj Suchánek (talk) 13:25, 6 March 2017 (UTC)

CWGC person ID (P1908) needs item components munged

When adding an url component "3066278/STEWART, JOHN EBENEZAR/" to this property it converted the generated url to have '+' instead of the spaces. If I force the snippet to have underscores replace the spaces this gets around the problem, that does ot seem a robust solution. It was suggested that toollabs:wikidata-externalid-url may be able to be utilised to resolve this issue. Thanks.  — billinghurst sDrewth 13:00, 5 March 2017 (UTC)

@billinghurst: you should only add the integer (3066278) to produce the url (http://www.cwgc.org/find-war-dead/casualty/3066278/), don't include the slug. Multichill (talk) 14:42, 5 March 2017 (UTC)
Hmm, okay, thanks. I checked one randomly and it had both bits. Could we please add an example to the ID.  — billinghurst sDrewth 21:59, 5 March 2017 (UTC)
Looks like Stewart is now the only one left with the number/NAME style - query. Andrew Gray (talk) 12:55, 6 March 2017 (UTC)
@billinghurst: I see an example on CWGC person ID (P1908) and the talk page. Is that what you're looking for? Multichill (talk) 17:48, 6 March 2017 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #250

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

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here.

Timeline of a deletion

How typical is this?

That's barely an hour from start to finish, and just 19 minutes for discussion. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 20:37, 6 March 2017 (UTC)

Without checking this particular item, most deletions are not controversial and do not require any discussion.--Ymblanter (talk) 21:08, 6 March 2017 (UTC)
I am agree with Ymblanter, but maybe not alla have the same idea on what is controversial. --ValterVB (talk) 21:33, 6 March 2017 (UTC)
It would be nice if the label of a deleted item could be posted as actual text in the deletion discussion, so a quickly-deleted item is less obscure to non-admin participants.--Pharos (talk) 21:57, 6 March 2017 (UTC)
On average, 793 items get deleted every day! With this amount it's impossible to start a discussion on all nominated items. Administrators have quickly to decide to either speedy delete and item, speedy keep an item or wait for futher user comments. ‎Q17332687 was certainly a candidate for speedy deletion. --Pasleim (talk) 22:12, 6 March 2017 (UTC)
Actually this one is controversial. It's part of this batch of deleted articles at the Dutch Wikipedia. These people are all elected in Belgium to the provincial council (Q2019652) and I would probably not have deleted them at the Dutch Wikipedia. So yes, these people are in my opinion notable. Multichill (talk) 22:20, 6 March 2017 (UTC)
The content on ‎Q17332687 did not indicate that it is about a politician or a person from Belgium. Searching the web for the name of the person returned social media profiles of a worker from the Netherelands, of a Belgium Taekwondo fighter, a German comedian, a Beglium politician, an Instagram user with 25 follower, a Youtube user with one playlist, etc... --Pasleim (talk) 22:48, 6 March 2017 (UTC)

Properties for deletion discussions overdue for closure

Earlier today, I left comments on six discussions at Wikidata:Properties for deletion:

in each case saying "I think that this discussion is resolved and can be archived. If you disagree, don't hesitate to replace this template with your comment.".

User:Jklamo has mass-reverted those edits, though they did not avail themself of the opportunity to leave a comment in any of them.

There has been no meaningful change of consensus in any of those sections for some time, and all lack consensus to delete (most show strong consensus to keep). The earliest was opened over a quarter of a year ago; even the most recent has been open for over three weeks.

Please can someone either restore my comments; or say why the individual discussions are not resolved; or at least close them? Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 22:55, 6 March 2017 (UTC)

Future of Wikispecies

It seems that the vision for the future relationship between Wikidata and Wikispecies varies. I've sought wider input, at meta:Wikimedia Forum#The future of Wikispecies. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 20:22, 6 March 2017 (UTC)

As far as I understand it's the choice of individual projects whether they want to import data from Wikidata. If Wikispecies doesn't want to import data frokm us, they don't have to do so and it's not up to outside parties to tell them to change their ways. ChristianKl (talk) 20:40, 6 March 2017 (UTC)
as you see, there are certain editors who love their sandbox more than collaboration. since we "work with the willing", they will be a roadblock for their projects, until they leave. Slowking4 (talk) 17:43, 7 March 2017 (UTC)

Vandalism templates

What are the templates for vandalisim?  – The preceding unsigned comment was added by PokestarFan (talk • contribs) at 22:38, 6 March 2017‎ (UTC). PokestarFan (talk) (My Contribs) 01:31, 7 March 2017 (UTC)

Don't get the question. The templates for vandalism are templates that you use to discourage users from doing bad edits. Or do you need to find them and get familiar with? Take a look at Category:User warning templates. Matěj Suchánek (talk) 15:17, 7 March 2017 (UTC)
Is there a way to search for the latest X times that a given template in that category was used? ChristianKl (talk) 17:09, 7 March 2017 (UTC)

Why search "Earth" doesn't return Earth (Q2) in the first 500 results?

As title. See: [5] --Fireattack (talk) 05:44, 1 March 2017 (UTC)

Edit: OK, I found this problem actually has two parts.
  • First, when you're typing "Earth" in the search box, the Earth (Q2) will indeed appear as the first result. HOWEVER, when you press "enter", it doesn't go to the first result like Wikipedia, instead, it goes to the last option, "pages containing 'Earth'".
  • The second part of the problem is that the "Earth" page is not in the very first results of the above search result. Actually, it's not even in the first 500 results.--Fireattack (talk) 05:52, 1 March 2017 (UTC)
For what it's worth, I don't find much value in the search bar on Wikidata. I often use a Google search containing the item I want to find and "wikidata", and it works just fine. Maybe Wikidata could shift to a Google custom search? Icebob99 (talk) 13:48, 1 March 2017 (UTC)
The search on Reasonator is also quite useful, even if it only reproduces the results of the ordinary search-box search, but with better annotation. IMO the Reasonator gadget is definitely worth turning on in your Preferences, if you haven't done so already, to add a sidebar link to Reasonator into your sidebar for every item page. Jheald (talk) 14:26, 1 March 2017 (UTC)
Tracked in Phabricator
Task T110648
Here's what seems to be the Phabricator ticket for the search results being rubbish. There doesn't seem to have been a lot of work since the end of 2015. One curiosity is that the search ranking seems to actively punish an item the more words its page contains -- ie the more statements on an item, the worse its search ranking. That is crazy! Jheald (talk) 14:40, 1 March 2017 (UTC)
Pinging @Aude: -- Jheald (talk) 14:43, 1 March 2017 (UTC)
Work is currently ongoing by Stas to make Elastic Search work better with Wikibase. That'll still take a bit but it's moving. --Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) (talk) 17:52, 1 March 2017 (UTC)
Have you tried Special:ItemByTitle? --Valerio Bozzolan (talk) 00:21, 8 March 2017 (UTC)

Locating styles in time and place

When writing about a style of clothing, we may want to indicate that it was popular in a time (for example, late 17th century to mid-18th century) and place (for example, Europe). Are any of our current date and location properties appropriate for this, or should we request some new ones? - PKM (talk) 21:54, 1 March 2017 (UTC)

Maybe you could mirror what I have sometimes seen for languages by using Property:P571 for the period (e.g. Q50868) and Property:P2341 for the place (e.g. Q35497). Parikan (talk) 05:12, 2 March 2017 (UTC)
Thank you; that sent me hunting. I think time period (P2348) "historic period or era in which the subject occured" will work very well for time, and indigenous to (P2341) will work for most issues of place. - PKM (talk) 00:31, 3 March 2017 (UTC)
It would be useful if you could collect your observations about expressing time and place in the Wikiproject Historical Place. It is a work-in-progress as most things are, and the aspect of periods has not been addressed, nor different use cases for expressing time and place. – Susanna Ånäs (Susannaanas) (talk) 05:52, 8 March 2017 (UTC)

External wiki sites in articles

Transferred from: Wikidata:Contact the development team#External wiki sites in articles.

Do you thing it would be a good idea to treat external wiki sites like IMSPL or sites of Wikia – that also have encyclopedic organisation of content as a "semi-internal" wiki projects? Let's say, instead IMSPL is an External identifier it would provide linking below Wikimedian links. So: Wikipedia, Wikisource ... Other sites and External wiki sites. For Johann Sebastian Bach there would stay:

External wiki sites (5 entries)      edit
Cpdl.org Johann Sebastian Bach
Familyguy.wikia.com Johann Sebastian Bach
Imspl.org Category:Bach, Johann Sebastian
Sachsen-anhalt-wiki.de Johann Sebastian Bach
Uncyclopedia.wikia.com Johann Sebastian Bach

--Janezdrilc (talk) 18:23, 1 March 2017 (UTC)

We have external-id's to link to the Wiki's to which we want to link. What do you consider to be the problem with the current solution? ChristianKl (talk) 18:59, 1 March 2017 (UTC)

The current solution is great, I just thought maybe it would be better to have all wikis on one "pile". --Janezdrilc (talk) 19:42, 1 March 2017 (UTC)

The current process means that we check whether a website is notable enough to get the links. I don't see why we should get rid of that step. ChristianKl (talk) 07:52, 3 March 2017 (UTC)

I think it's good for Wikidata to link to external wikis, but they should be kept in the "external identifier" section rather than the "internal interwikis" section. If we include them like another Wikimedia Foundation wiki, we risk giving the false impression that they are part of Wikimedia, which might make them feel belittled and bring us unwanted controversy. Deryck Chan (talk) 11:08, 8 March 2017 (UTC)

What happened to the image gadget?

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T159678

At some point there was a gadget that displayed images on the top right corner. What happened to it?
--- Jura 07:57, 5 March 2017 (UTC)

@Jonas Kress (WMDE): --Pasleim (talk) 09:40, 5 March 2017 (UTC)
It is a user script if you like I could turn it into a gadget or beta feature. --Jonas Kress (WMDE) (talk) 11:31, 5 March 2017 (UTC)
I just noticed that I had added //www.wikidata.org/w/index.php?title=User:Jonas_Kress_(WMDE)/header_image.js&action=raw&ctype=text/javascript for User:Jonas_Kress_(WMDE)/header_image.js
but somehow it stopped working. I even concluded that items didn't have images as they weren't displayed. Maybe it's just my other config that breaks it.
--- Jura 11:38, 5 March 2017 (UTC)
Just checked, it seems broken I will fix it when I am in the office. Thanks for noticing! --Jonas Kress (WMDE) (talk) 11:44, 5 March 2017 (UTC)
Thanks! And +1 for making it a gadget.
--- Jura 11:59, 5 March 2017 (UTC)
  Support for making it a gadget. I think in the past https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Special:Nearby was showing an image. The function of showing the image seems also broken. I don't know whether it's a different task, but I thought it's worth to point out at this point. ChristianKl (talk) 12:34, 5 March 2017 (UTC)
It seems page thumbnail is not set and this is the cause for header image and Special:Nearby not working, thank you for your feedback. --Jonas Kress (WMDE) (talk) 18:15, 5 March 2017 (UTC)
I filed phabricator:T159678. --Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) (talk) 09:57, 6 March 2017 (UTC)

User:Jonas Kress (WMDE)/header image.js should be updated to include license=any in the API request it does. Fixing Special:Nearby is not that easy, see phab:T159678. --Thiemo Mättig (WMDE) 10:03, 6 March 2017 (UTC)

I have update the user script it should work again now, thanks for your help --Jonas Kress (WMDE) (talk) 10:18, 6 March 2017 (UTC)

For your information, the script has just been made a gadget... but it's missing a description. Does anybody have some? Matěj Suchánek (talk) 14:49, 8 March 2017 (UTC)

Way to duplicate items sharing similar values for properties

Is there any bot or any easy way to duplicate items that share similar values for properties but for some? Jsamwrites (talk) 16:39, 7 March 2017 (UTC)

@Jsamwrites: Yes; Magnus made a script, at my request: User:Magnus Manske/duplicate_item.js. It's powerful, and will copy the labels in every language if you let it; use it with care! Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 13:32, 8 March 2017 (UTC)

Jean Calas - Affaire Calas

I cannot links the page Jean Calas (en) with Affaire Calas (fr), how can i merge this items? They are about the same topic.

Could not save due to an error. The link enwiki:Jean Calas is already used by item Q360000. You may remove it from Q360000 if it does not belong there or merge the items if they are about the exact same topic. Assianir (talk) 10:18, 8 March 2017 (UTC)

Firstly, please provide the relevant QIDs (like Jean Calas (Q360000)) when you mention items. From what information you do give, it seems that one item is about a person, the other (Jean Calas affair (Q28650272)?) about an event, so they are not suitable for merging. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 11:21, 8 March 2017 (UTC)
Wikipedia pages linked to Jean Calas (Q360000) and Jean Calas affair (Q28650272) speak about exactly the same things (biography + affaire) but in Wikidata it's two different items. Tubezlob (🙋) 13:56, 8 March 2017 (UTC)

Simplifying traditional Chinese labels

For those interested in Chinese labels, I just processed over 45,000 "zh" labels of places to check if they were simplified or traditional text. Found out that close to 9,000 of the labels had one or more traditional character in them. This was done by simplifying the labels using the Open Chinese Convert (OpenCC) library and comparing with the original. What is the policy over "zh" labels in Wikidata, are they expected to be simplified or traditional? I'm planning to add the 9,000 simplified labels to the "zh-hans" label, should I also be fixing the "zh" labels or should it be left as it is?

Please check this spreadsheet with the full list of items with a traditional "zh" label and the simplified "zh>zh-hans" label to compare the difference --Planemad (talk) 08:07, 7 March 2017 (UTC)

@Planemad: Chinese speaker here. To encourage people to contribute, the gentlemen's agreement is that the preference of the first contributor to each bit of text should be respected. If the label is simplified, then the traditional version (and regional variants) can be added as an alias and vice versa. The Chinese Wikipedia doesn't even discourage mixed prose because editors from different Chinese-speaking regions should be encouraged to collaborate. So there is no need to "fix" anything.
Direct translations to zh-hans or zh-hant are generally discouraged on multilingual Wikimedia projects because this creates additional curation workload. The recommended method is to create one zh version, then use meta:Automatic conversion between simplified and traditional Chinese to generate and adapt other variants. You can see this at work in e.g. wm2013:Must-read_tips/zh. Deryck Chan (talk) 14:01, 7 March 2017 (UTC)
@Deryck Chan: Thank you, that makes it clear there is no need to update the existing "zh" labels. There are however a handful of cases where i've found traditional text in "zh-hans" or "zh-cn", i'm guessing this should be ok to fix? Aside from that i'll start uploading the automatically converted text into "zh-hans" --Planemad (talk) 16:55, 7 March 2017 (UTC)
@Planemad: Depends on how big your "handful" is. There are occasions when a bot might detect false-positive "traditional" characters in simplified text and vice versa due to inadequate contextual awareness. I'd prefer to have a human look at the list before automatically converting all of them by bot, unless the amount is so large to be unmanageable. Deryck Chan (talk) 22:47, 7 March 2017 (UTC)
@Deryck Chan: If you are asking about LanguageConverter usage of /zh pages which are created by Translate extension, it's really a tricky thing for us, cf. phab:T106131 and phab:T150083. --Liuxinyu970226 (talk) 05:13, 9 March 2017 (UTC)
@Liuxinyu970226: - No, I'm talking about Planemad's request above, where his program identified a number of zh-* labels that have incorrect variant tags (like a Simplified Chinese label tagged as zh-hant). Thanks for letting me know those phab tasks though; I've added my comments. Deryck Chan (talk) 11:59, 9 March 2017 (UTC)

Copy over huggle Templates

Could someone copy over all of the huggle templates from en wikipedia? PokestarFan (talk) (My Contribs) 01:55, 8 March 2017 (UTC)

The first question is, does Huggle work here? MechQuester (talk) 05:09, 8 March 2017 (UTC)
I just logged on to check, and yes it does. It even properly displays property names in the correct language. Most of the edits are in languages I don't understand though which might make it not very useful. Lankiveil (talk) 05:36, 8 March 2017 (UTC).
However, it does sometime identify spam, especially in around 1:00 UTC. It can be useful. PokestarFan (talk) (My Contribs) 19:57, 8 March 2017 (UTC)

Redirects

Hi, I couldn't find any documentation for Wikipedia redirect pages in Wikidata. I found an item, Juan Sebastián Elcano (Q18191798), that was the item for a redirect page. I can't merge the two items because both have Wikipedia site links. What do I do for redirects? Thanks, Icebob99 (talk) 14:53, 8 March 2017 (UTC)

It starts with the question of whether the two items are the same conceptual entity. Without knowing Korean that's hard to tell in this case. If it's the same conceptual entity you can remove the redirect link and merge. On the other hand, if it's a different conceptual entity, don't merge and keep the links intact. ChristianKl (talk) 15:51, 8 March 2017 (UTC)
I don't know how to create redirects other than merging them. PokestarFan (talk) (My Contribs) 19:59, 8 March 2017 (UTC)
@Icebob99, -revi, ChristianKl, PokestarFan: It's just an alias name of Juan Sebastián Elcano (Q201510), so   Done. --Liuxinyu970226 (talk) 05:18, 9 March 2017 (UTC)
Why would we link a redirect? They change, they will not be moved so links will not automatically follow, they are hardly notable. They are strewn around the place like confetti as they are considered cheap, so what is the value of listing them?  — billinghurst sDrewth 11:25, 9 March 2017 (UTC)
It isn't worthwhile to have items for the purpose of representing redirects. If there's however a reason for the item to exist, the redirect is valuable. I recently created the item fingerless glove (Q28865095). It's a well defined concept but it doesn't have it's own Wikipedia article. Linking to the redirect however allows a user to read what Wikipedia has to say about fingerless gloves.
Listing redirects also helps with interwiki links. ChristianKl (talk) 11:46, 9 March 2017 (UTC)

How do I connect the results of a query to the amount of articles read?

For the Black Lunch Table we have a query that indicates the number of articles in several Wikipedias. How can the result of a query be used to get the number of articles read. Is it possible to get results from the past based on dumps? Thanks, GerardM (talk) 16:50, 9 March 2017 (UTC)

Hovercards and dragref broken?

It seems as both the hovercards and the dragref features here on Wikidata are broken. Anyone know why and when one can expect a fix? //Mippzon (talk) 18:50, 9 March 2017 (UTC)

Fusion of en:Category:Delos with German de:Kategorie:Delos

Can someone fusion en:Category:Delos with German de:Kategorie:Delos ? 88.70.33.10 01:07, 14 March 2017 (UTC)

Done MechQuester (talk) 02:28, 14 March 2017 (UTC)
This section was archived on a request by: Matěj Suchánek (talk) 14:58, 15 March 2017 (UTC)

Was the Allied High Commission (Q314974) an embassy (Q3917681)?

According to the English Wikipedia: The Allied High Commission (...) was established by the United States of America, the United Kingdom, and France after the 1948 breakdown of the Allied Control Council to regulate and supervise the development of the newly established Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany).

In my opinion, something that regulates and supervises the country it is in can not be called an embassy. An embassy only has a diplomatic role, it does not regulate nor supervise the country it is in.

So, what should the Allied High Commission (Q314974) be an instance of?

Thank you! Syced (talk) 06:29, 9 March 2017 (UTC)

I agree that it is not an embassy. - Brya (talk) 06:37, 9 March 2017 (UTC)
It is a wikt:commission no. 4 "body or group of people, officially tasked with carrying out a particular function" and definitely not an embassy. That the commonwealth of nations use "high commission" rather than embassy for their inter-governmental relationships is an arcane difference, and more relates back to the single head of state for many of them, and fits within the definition though only due to its broadness, not its functionality.  — billinghurst sDrewth 11:31, 9 March 2017 (UTC)
FWIW, the Commonwealth "High Commissions" probably started out with more of a regulat[ory] and supervis[ory] role, not unlike the case described. They have evolved into embassies over time, though certainly they do fill that role today. StevenJ81 (talk) 15:28, 9 March 2017 (UTC)
It is not just a commission; something more should be added. And, apparently this commission never served as an embassy. - Brya (talk) 05:51, 10 March 2017 (UTC)

Electrotyping: clean up Q15031376 and Q6456484

These two need to be cleaned up or merged. In particular, either is currently a subclass of the other.

But Q6456484 appears to be a subtype of the other, and most wikilinks should be moved to the other (some may even need to be moved Q17708655).

But I know too little of this subject to be able to tell which should go where, and which should be a subclass of which.

-- Chire (talk) 20:59, 9 March 2017 (UTC)

It seems as if Q6456484 is different from Q15031376, so I just got rid of the en label. PokestarFan (talk) (My Contribs) 21:45, 9 March 2017 (UTC)
Undone. That's not helpful. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 11:19, 10 March 2017 (UTC)

Item Q14458220

I'd like to add enwiki:Strawberry to the list but there seems to be a conflict:

Could not save due to an error. The link enwiki:Strawberry is already used by item Q13158. You may remove it from Q13158 if it does not belong there or merge the items if they are about the exact same topic.

What do you think about it? --Guiwp (talk) 15:38, 10 March 2017 (UTC)

strawberry (Q14458220) is the fruit, strawberry (Q13158) is the plant. If w:en:Strawberry is about the fruit, you need to remove the link from the first item and then add it to the second item. Matěj Suchánek (talk) 15:58, 10 March 2017 (UTC)
I removed and added to the second. Thanks. --Guiwp (talk) 17:19, 10 March 2017 (UTC)

API query: When was statement added?

How can I using the API query when and who did enter a certain statement to Wikidata? --Jobu0101 (talk) 16:12, 4 March 2017 (UTC)

There is no dedicated API query (yet). But you can take a look at a user script which integrates this feature to UI. Matěj Suchánek (talk) 15:20, 7 March 2017 (UTC)
@Matěj Suchánek: Is there no API call to read out all revisions in normal Wikipedia? Then I could simply check by software what changed. --Jobu0101 (talk) 21:27, 10 March 2017 (UTC)
To make it clear, there is no dedicated API module to find out who added the given statement. Of course, you can query revisions one by one like this and check for changes. Matěj Suchánek (talk) 21:53, 10 March 2017 (UTC)
@Matěj Suchánek: Thank you, that helps a lot. --Jobu0101 (talk) 22:11, 10 March 2017 (UTC)

USDA Food Composition Databases

Hi guys, I see that wikipedia in all language use the USDA database. Some users just go to the website and fill all the data in the template responsible for showing that kind of stuff. Someone skilled in programming could just make a bot, gather all the information there and put here on wikidata, later on update those articles that use this data with just some sort of link to here.

I don't know if I was very clear about my idea but the idea is to reuse information, not copy it (or at least try to just make one copy of it and reference it somewhere else). --Guiwp (talk) 20:53, 10 March 2017 (UTC)

WMF hiring for multimedia and structured data on commons

Hi, Apologies for cross-posting this, I just want to make sure we reach the right folks.
The Wikimedia Foundation is hiring a product manager for multimedia support/features and, most immediately, the structured data on commons project. We think it would be tremendously helpful if that person was already a member of the Wikimedia movement.  Given that the structured data project is closely tied to wikidata, I wanted to make sure folks on this list were aware.

If you have product management experience and are interested in learning more, please see the job description and apply here.  Please copy this notice anywhere else you think interested community members might see it.  

Thanks in advance, Jkatz (WMF) (talk) 02:08, 11 March 2017 (UTC)

Usage of density (P2054) for population density

This topic was previously discussed, but since population density property proposal was rejected, I'd like to see what to do with existing usages of density (P2054) for population density. Should I just delete them? Should we have some other property - which one? Most of existing usage are cities, and these numbers (which are now unitless) are useless in the form they are now and use wrong property, violating its constraints. Ideas? --Laboramus (talk) 06:07, 11 March 2017 (UTC)

Population density can be derived from population (P1082)/area (P2046), so there is no need to have a property for this. I support deleting them where we know this information. Matěj Suchánek (talk) 09:16, 11 March 2017 (UTC)
Concur that we don't need something for population density in situations where the area and total population are known. What do we do in situations where one or both of those are missing, but we do have a reliable density figure? Lankiveil (talk) 13:41, 11 March 2017 (UTC).
If the property has been improperly utilised, the incorrect usage should be removed, and the labels update to better describe the purpose.  — billinghurst sDrewth 15:58, 11 March 2017 (UTC)

Individual fire stations and police stations–should they be in Wikidata?

I accidentally created Kergunyah Fire Station (Q28925625). Should I request deletion of it or flesh it out? Are individual fire stations the sort of things we want to create Wikidata entities for? The VICNAMES database I am importing into VICNAMES Place ID (P3472) has entries for 825 fire stations and 359 police stations – do we want to import all of those? SJK (talk) 12:54, 11 March 2017 (UTC)

Yes, we do! Thierry Caro (talk) 12:58, 11 March 2017 (UTC)
Okay, you've convinced me. I am using QuickStatements to import all 825 fire stations now. (I could use mix'n'match too but QuickStatements is quicker.) When QS is done with the fire stations, I'll do the police stations too. (Possibly some of these are non-current/historic fire/police stations as opposed to active ones, but I guess if that is true people will work it out eventually.) I'm also going to try importing all the coordinates after I get some sleep. SJK (talk) 13:54, 11 March 2017 (UTC)
If you edit OpenStreetMap, you can add the QIDs to the relevant objects there too. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 14:43, 11 March 2017 (UTC)

8000 images-item couples, from Wikivoyage

Wikivoyage has "listings" with an image and a Wikidata item. For instance, the Louvre listing has both the name of a Commons image and the relevant QID.
I created and uploaded a list of the QID-Commons image couples here.

Any volunteer to add these images to the items that don't have an image yet?

I would do it myself but I have no idea how to implement it and am worried that I might add images to items that already have one. Thanks a lot! Syced (talk) 14:04, 14 March 2017 (UTC)

I assume by "Wikivoyage" you mean the English Wikivoyage, right?--Ymblanter (talk) 19:54, 14 March 2017 (UTC)
In any case, the project needs to be informed. If someone starts do it in the Russian Wikivoyage without doscussion, we will likely block them.--Ymblanter (talk) 19:55, 14 March 2017 (UTC)
Why would you block someone (on Wikivoyage?) who adds images on Wikidata items? Stryn (talk) 20:16, 14 March 2017 (UTC)
I guess we would assume this is an unflagged bot.--Ymblanter (talk) 21:47, 14 March 2017 (UTC)
The task is about adding the images TO Wikidata, so I don't think permission from anyone at Wikivoyage is needed. By the way, the data is extracted from the Wikivoyage listings database, which gathers data from several Wikivoyages (fr/ru/en/de). Cheers! Syced (talk) 03:33, 15 March 2017 (UTC)
I have and idea how to do that. If nobody else picks it up, will do in next few days. The idea is to do SPARQL queries in batches by X items, querying for P18. And then simply do list/array (or whatever it's called in preferred language) difference. Īzī :) --Edgars2007 (talk) 08:33, 15 March 2017 (UTC)
Edgars2007: Thanks a lot! Please let me know when you are done, so that I can thank you again ;-) If you write a script, would you mind posting it to Github or to my talk page, so that I can try and run it every once in a while? Good luck! :-) Syced (talk) 02:26, 16 March 2017 (UTC)
This section was archived on a request by: --Edgars2007 (talk) 13:13, 17 March 2017 (UTC)

Advise please on cy-home page

If you select Welsh language (cy) and select 'Home' or the WD logo, it gives you a blank page. It should direct to here. Any help please? Llywelyn2000 (talk) 11:21, 15 March 2017 (UTC)

fixed --Pasleim (talk) 12:55, 15 March 2017 (UTC)
MANY THANKS! Llywelyn2000 (talk) 16:00, 15 March 2017 (UTC)
@Pasleim: While we're on the subject, it does the same for Irish (ga), sending one to non-existent page Príomhleathanach. Lankiveil (talk) 04:41, 16 March 2017 (UTC).
Yes! And Gaelic. @Pasleim: - any chance please; I'll try and get them translated. Thanks! Llywelyn2000 (talk) 06:37, 16 March 2017 (UTC)
  Done Matěj Suchánek (talk) 08:17, 16 March 2017 (UTC)
Go raibh maith agaibh! Lankiveil (talk) 23:40, 16 March 2017 (UTC)
This section was archived on a request by: Matěj Suchánek (talk) 08:42, 17 March 2017 (UTC)

Exit sign

why is there an exit sign on the top left corner instead of the usual Wikidata logo? MechQuester (talk) 15:14, 16 March 2017 (UTC)

Never mind. That was my browser with junk. I cleared it out. MechQuester (talk) 17:37, 16 March 2017 (UTC)
@MechQuester:Read up on malware, viruses, and antivirus. It might just help! PokestarFan (talk) (My Contribs) 19:58, 16 March 2017 (UTC)
Also, you did one indent too many. PokestarFan (talk) (My Contribs) 01:14, 17 March 2017 (UTC)
This section was archived on a request by: Matěj Suchánek (talk) 08:45, 17 March 2017 (UTC)

Vandalism

I am seeing a lot of vandalism. However, there is no option to quickly undo it and leave the user a warning message. Is there a tool that can do this on Wikidata? It would surely make my life easier. PokestarFan (talk) 20:37, 1 March 2017 (UTC)

Its called rollback tool. However, seeing that you have been blocked on two wikis for competence issues, some people wont be willing to grant you it MechQuester (talk) 21:17, 1 March 2017 (UTC)
Also can someone please check the descriptions PokestarFan has been adding to exoplanets? I can tell at least that the Bengali descriptions being added are redundant (literally "exoplanet planet"). Mahir256 (talk) 21:36, 1 March 2017 (UTC)
Blame google translate  – The preceding unsigned comment was added by PokestarFan (talk • contribs) at 21:45, 1 March 2017‎ (UTC).
do not overreachMechQuester (talk) 21:51, 1 March 2017 (UTC)
@PokestarFan: No. You are responsible for your edits. Don't use Google translate if you don't have the competence to verify the translation yourself. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 15:55, 2 March 2017 (UTC)
@Pigsonthewing: now how do I revert around 2k edits?  – The preceding unsigned comment was added by PokestarFan (talk • contribs) at 21:47, 2 March 2017‎ (UTC).
Manually. and PLEASE sign your responses. MechQuester (talk) 03:40, 3 March 2017 (UTC)
@PokestarFan: You can ask an admin or bot operator to do that for you - see links to the relevant noticeboards at the top of this page. You will need to explain how the edits may be found (or provide a list), and why they should be reverted. As MechQuester says, please sign your talk page comments; you own talk page has details of how to do so. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 11:24, 6 March 2017 (UTC)
@Pigsonthewing: I know how to sign, but I just forget to. PokestarFan (talk) (My Contribs) 20:59, 6 March 2017 (UTC)
The competence issues initially shown were pretty.... low. I just reverted 2 edits for either idiocy or plain vandalism. MechQuester (talk) 04:32, 12 March 2017 (UTC)

Trade fairs

I have a couple of questions about trade fair (Q57305).

Example: E3 (Q336168) Constraint report

  • Why does associating a trade fair with an industry (P452) cause a constraint violation? Should we use a different property?
  • How should we identify the company producing a trade fair? manufacturer (Q13235160) is a profession, so that's not right; production company (Q11396960) is specifically related to media and entertainment.
  • We need to be able to associate social media handles with trade fairs. How can we fix this?

Thanks! - PKM (talk) 21:21, 11 March 2017 (UTC)

Ah, looks like "producer" should be organizer (P664). - PKM (talk) 21:27, 11 March 2017 (UTC)

Best property for special groupings of federal subjects in Russia

The 85 federal subject of Russia (Q43263) have a political dependency (their located in the administrative territorial entity (P131)) directly from Russia (Q159). However, are also grouped by two other official concepts not related with administrative tree of located in the administrative territorial entity (P131). Specifically: the federal district of Russia (Q484215) and economic region of Russia (Q565410) (see: the list). My question is: what property should hold this info in each federal subject item?. part of (P361) ?, member of (P463)?, Any other ?. Thanks.--Amadalvarez (talk) 21:06, 8 March 2017 (UTC)

I would say part of (P361)--Ymblanter (talk) 12:15, 11 March 2017 (UTC)
@Ymblanter: I think so, and I'm doing in municipalities of Spain. Thanks--Amadalvarez (talk) 07:01, 12 March 2017 (UTC)

Graph traversal on multiple properties

Hey folks,

I would like to do graph traversal starting from a given node on multiple properties. I found in examples query for searching children of Genghis Khan: 

PREFIX gas: <http://www.bigdata.com/rdf/gas#>

SELECT ?item ?itemLabel ?pic ?linkTo
WHERE
{
  SERVICE gas:service {
    gas:program gas:gasClass "com.bigdata.rdf.graph.analytics.SSSP" ;
                gas:in wd:Q720 ;
                gas:traversalDirection "Forward" ;
                gas:out ?item ;
                gas:out1 ?depth ;
                gas:maxIterations 4 ;
                gas:linkType wdt:P40 .
  }
  OPTIONAL { ?item wdt:P40 ?linkTo }
  OPTIONAL { ?item wdt:P18 ?pic }
  SERVICE wikibase:label {bd:serviceParam wikibase:language "en" }
}
Try it!

This is all nice but I would like to do the traversal on more properties, e.g. instead of only following 'child' branches I would like to traverse also father/mother/spouse and build full family trees.

I tried with gas:linkType wdt:P40/wdt:P25* . and putting OR but nothing worked. Also, any idea where can I find API description for gas?

Thanks!  – The preceding unsigned comment was added by 77.46.217.47 (talk • contribs).

Docs for RDF GAS API are here. But as far as I know you can't traverse using multiple properties. You can still traverse recursively using *-notation or UNION statements (BlazeGraph does not support elt{1,n} syntax, but other features from property path spec are supported). For example, here is a query for your needs:
SELECT ?level ?item ?relation ?linkTo ?itemLabel ?pic
{
  hint:Query hint:optimizer "None"
  { BIND(0 AS ?level) BIND(wd:Q7200 AS ?item) } UNION
  {
    VALUES ?relation { wdt:P22 wdt:P25 } 
    { BIND(1 AS ?level) BIND(wd:Q7200 AS ?linkTo) }
    UNION
    { BIND(2 AS ?level) ?linkTo wdt:P22|wdt:P25 wd:Q7200 }
    UNION
    { BIND(3 AS ?level) ?linkTo (wdt:P22|wdt:P25)/(wdt:P22|wdt:P25) wd:Q7200 }
    UNION
    { BIND(4 AS ?level) ?linkTo (wdt:P22|wdt:P25)/(wdt:P22|wdt:P25)/(wdt:P22|wdt:P25) wd:Q7200 }
    ?item ?relation ?linkTo
  }

  OPTIONAL { ?item wdt:P18 ?pic }
  SERVICE wikibase:label {bd:serviceParam wikibase:language "en"}
}
ORDER BY ?level
Try it!
--Lockal (talk) 17:26, 12 March 2017 (UTC)

Catalog and Catalog code

Hoi, it is suggested that I use these properties to identify items that are part of a project. For me the combination would be First identify the Catalog and then an associated code. The code is of lesser importance. When I look at Chihuaha I find that the catalog shows as one of the statements.

This is exactly why we proposed a property that does show. A Catalog is a statement that is of no intrinsic value except to the project itself and it is therefore not really usable. So can we please decide that we either have properties for individual projects or mend the way Catalog and Catalog code works. NB it makes better sense to have the catalog first and the code as a qualifier. Thanks, GerardM (talk) 08:26, 26 February 2017 (UTC

Discussion is at Wikidata:Property proposal/Black Lunch Table ID. The catalogue in this case would be an item for "Black Lunch Table"; the code would be the "Black Lunch Table ID", in the format "BLT-######". I'm not clear why this doesn't meet your requirements. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 21:47, 27 February 2017 (UTC)
What I need is to identify an item as part of the "catalog". This does not need to show in the same way as an external source does not need to show. The result is something like this as you can see this functions in queries. Thanks, GerardM (talk) 10:37, 28 February 2017 (UTC)
We use the Catalog for the Black Lunch Table. In stead of keeping the spreadsheet, we are replacing it with the information in Wikidata. In effect it replaces both the spread sheet and allows for the replacement of multiple Wikipedia lists. A qualifier is used to indicate the location of an editathon. This allows for the use of the same data for an additional list. By including the "red linked" articles in Wikidata there is a complete list that can be used using Listeria on multiple Wikipedias. Articles are written in multiple languages. Thanks are due to multiple people for contributing their ideas and some queries that make it obvious that Wikidata is a superb tool for managing Wikipedia projets. Thanks, GerardM (talk) 09:36, 7 March 2017 (UTC)
In contrast to the Women in Red Wikidata-based lists here en:Wikipedia:WikiProject Women in Red/Missing articles by occupation/Animators and cartoonists and here en:Wikipedia:WikiProject Women in Red/Meetup/37#Work lists, which are somewhat horrifyingly manually managed, the very systematic and organized methodology described above that Gerard came up with will allow for metrics and usability testing -- as well as cross-functionality between Wikipedia and Wikidata that is very rich in future pathways. It will also be a huge push to new Wikipedia editors to actually use and understand the power and functionality of Wikidata as it relates to Wikipedia as well as how Wikidata is serving as a semantic backbone of Wikipedia, as a repository itself, and as a query-rich database. It's an excellent, effective project and can be transferred across user groups and chapters as a skillshare and methodology to automate task lists. -- Erika aka BrillLyle (talk) 13:04, 7 March 2017 (UTC)

The use of Catalog & indicating that objects by an artist are in a GLAM

Hoi, I use Catalog but it has a previous meaning and consequently it is seen as sub optimal. The question is what to do. I want for simplicity's sake a property for a Wikimedia project where it is used to manage a group of items that cannot be otherwise be identified by a query. That or the current use is accepted/acceptable.

Also in many articles it is identified that an artist has objects in the permanent collection of a GLAM. It is suggested to me to use the property "Property:P1343" because "a GLAM must have a description for the artist". As this is not necessarily public, a property specific to this situation "has material in collection" "GLAM" seems like a good idea. For those GLAMs that have identifiers, the identifier could be used as a reference. Thanks, GerardM (talk) 19:40, 12 March 2017 (UTC)

Wizards, Muggles and Wikidata: The Room of Requirements for structured knowledge

Hi all

Myself, Jens Ohlig and NavinoEvans have written a post for the Wikimedia blog about Wikidata explored through the lens of Harry Potter. Hope you like it.

Thanks

--John Cummings (talk) 20:10, 8 March 2017 (UTC)

This is wonderful. - PKM (talk) 21:19, 8 March 2017 (UTC)

I don't like that you call wikipedians muggles. But i'm not surprised. --Atlasowa (talk) 11:18, 9 March 2017 (UTC)

i like it a lot, and the "lack of surprise" is very amusing. no magic hoarding. Slowking4 (talk) 18:57, 12 March 2017 (UTC)
  •  
    Magic at work...
  •  
    Wikidatans upload mass data, Wikipedians aka Muggles to the conveyor belt for clean-up...
  •  
    Muggles at the conveyor belt, doing the manual tasks

Are first editions "editions"?

When creating a data item for a book or other work, is the original (first) edition considered an "edition" has edition or translation (P747) and given a separate data item from the primary data item for the work, or should the first edition be part of the primary data item? --EncycloPetey (talk) 05:25, 9 March 2017 (UTC)

@EncycloPetey: If there are no other editions (which will be true for a great majority of works) then it seems unnecessary and unhelpful to have separate data. Otherwise, editions of a book have differences between them--it's not necessarily the case that the first edition is the "canonical" or "master" copy. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 06:43, 9 March 2017 (UTC)
@EncycloPetey: I believe that it should be, and I encourage you to separate them with a different approach. We need to separate the intellectual idea (the work) from the physical rendition (the edition, in whatever form). A lecture/speech given at a point in time can have edition which is published (and with these I do two items.) A work/book can become a movie, whereas an edition would not become a movie. From the original expression of the idea can spring many formats.  — billinghurst sDrewth 11:20, 9 March 2017 (UTC)
True, but I am trying to nail down the place where we draw the line. For example, is the First Folio of Shakespeare a "work" or an "edition"? Even that question is not as simple as it sounds, since we have the question of multiple printings and facsimile "editions", which are not new editions. --EncycloPetey (talk) 14:37, 9 March 2017 (UTC)
@EncycloPetey: It is problematic when editions of a work fork. The number of editions fails, and we should probably stop trying to put edition numbering of such works. They are all "editions of" the work, and the system utilised here lacks the maturity, of information density to assist. Best you can do is use the other information like publication year, editor, publisher to better identify the edition that you have.  — billinghurst sDrewth 16:05, 11 March 2017 (UTC)
@EncycloPetey: +1 on having a different entity for the work and for the edition, especially as we can't know that there will be no more edition of a work in the future, and unmixing work and edition claims then would be a mess. If you haven't yet, you may want to have a look at the WikiProject_Books where those modelization issues are discussed -- Maxlath (talk) 12:47, 9 March 2017 (UTC)
I've looked, but it usually isn't helpful for the issues I'm dealing with. --EncycloPetey (talk) 14:37, 9 March 2017 (UTC)

Follow-up Question: So, it the primary data item is for the "work", and not for any specific edition / publication, does that mean that the main data item for a work should not have any publication information? That the publication information about each edition should be placed on separate data items from that of the work proper? This seems the logical result. And how will this impact WP projects whose infoboxes rely upon data about a work from Wikidata? --EncycloPetey (talk) 15:22, 12 March 2017 (UTC)

I would think that for a published work that the "first" publication date is required for infoboxes. It is when the intellectual property (copyright) takes effect, and the alternates in copyright law flow through as per each set of legislation. Where I have done lectures I have always put the date of presentation for the event, then done editions with the year of publication.  — billinghurst sDrewth 01:28, 13 March 2017 (UTC)

Library of Congress in the United States using Wikidata QIDs in some authority records

If you look at this example or this example you'll find the Wikidata QID listed in the "other standard numbers" section. YULdigitalpreservation (talk) 15:36, 9 March 2017 (UTC)

ooo how exciting. What types of data specifically was introduced to their content? MechQuester (talk) 16:34, 9 March 2017 (UTC)
I wonder if this is being passed through VIAF? Lankiveil (talk) 04:21, 10 March 2017 (UTC).
apparently [6] & [7] - back in 2012, this was integrated in wikipedia [8]. Slowking4 (talk) 19:05, 12 March 2017 (UTC)

How to link a reference to a reference template?

We have Category:Citation templates (Q6819344) which links for example to species:Category:Reference templates. A template example at Wikispecies is species:Template:Hofmann & Tremewan, 2010. I created A revised check-list of the genus Zygaena Fabricius, 1775 (Lepidoptera: Zygaenidae, Zygaeninae), based on the biospecies concept (Q28924047). Do we have a way to connect the reference template with the "real" reference? --Succu (talk) 20:14, 10 March 2017 (UTC)

Like this. In fact, the Wikispecies template, which is currently unstructured, could be made to call its values - all of which are present here - from Wikidata. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 23:32, 10 March 2017 (UTC)
I doubt this is correct. The item is not a Wikimedia template (Q11266439). --Succu (talk) 19:52, 12 March 2017 (UTC)

List of 1000 articles every Wikipedia should have / List of Wikipedias by sample of articles

Wikidata:List of 1000 articles every Wikipedia should have is a Listeriabot generated list based on items used at meta:List of Wikipedias by sample of articles. How can the list be expaned? 77.180.210.158 02:25, 12 March 2017 (UTC)

This is exactly one other use for a Wikimedia project list. Thanks, GerardM (talk) 19:43, 12 March 2017 (UTC)

IP Vandalism

Hi An IP Address Have made vandalism in Article Wikidata. Please protect it from the Article WikidataModern Sciences (talk) 18:31, 12 March 2017 (UTC)

The IP hadn't edit for an hour before you reported the problem. Vandalising users are usually warned before they can be blocked. Next time, please add such requests to Wikidata:Administrators' noticeboard. Matěj Suchánek (talk) 19:05, 12 March 2017 (UTC)

Terms and things

Is it correct to say that weft (Q588676) is both a <subclass of> textile component (Q28935994) and a term (Q1969448) <of/in> weaving (Q192296)? I don't get a constraint violation, but describing the object and its name in the same item seems a bit odd. - PKM (talk) 00:13, 13 March 2017 (UTC)

The actual topic involved, that is weft, is quite clearly not a term. There is also a term "weft", but the image linked from that item is quite clearly not an image of that, and the term is also not a subclass of textile component. It's quite rare that items are actually about terms. --Yair rand (talk) 03:52, 13 March 2017 (UTC)
I remove "instance of term" from items that are subclasses of something else, like your example, wherever I see it. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 10:08, 13 March 2017 (UTC)
Okay, I'll clean up mine, thanks! - PKM (talk) 18:23, 13 March 2017 (UTC)

‎Redirect en links

At here there are some items which have redirected enwiki links. what should do with them?Yamaha5 (talk) 11:18, 13 March 2017 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #251

 
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Development
    • Converted undo/restore interface to use OOUI. You can test it here (phab:T134643).
    • Fixed an other rounding issue on geo coordinates (phab:T158772).
    • Added thumbnail images to the Wikimedia Commons suggester (phab:T160319).
    • Continued working on introducing Lexeme entity type.
    • Finishing federation prototype.
    • We are going to change all snak, reference, and qualifier hashes with the planned DataModel 7.0 release. If you are a tool developer, make sure you do not persist hashes, and never use them to request edits to entities. Statement IDs are safe (phab:T157965).
    • Removed unnecessary CSS on ooui special pages (phabricator:T159702)
    • Allowed example queries to be searched for SPARQL commands (phabricator:T154768)
    • Converted Wikibase interface for undoing/restoring a revision to OOUI (phabricator:T134643)
    • Converted image header user script to gadget (phabricator:T159929)
    • Started writing spec for technical data model for Wiktionary support (phabricator:T150785)
    • Worked on providing API for constraint check (phabricator:T102757)

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here.


How to add qualifier for 'acting' presidents

Hello, long time no see.

South Korea has no official "President" for now, so prime minister is acting as president. Its Constitutional Court also has no president as the term has expired, so other justice is acting as a president. I think some sort of qualifier should be used, but I don't have any idea on what Property and item to use to denote that.

(Removing it isn't a good option imo as (s)he indeed served as a president of given organization.) — Revi 09:24, 18 March 2017 (UTC)

While the role is acting from a political point of view, is it acting from a governmental perspective? Does the person have all the powers, or any qualification of their role? I would record it with the dates, the predecessor and the successor component. If they do not have full powers, then it is a different role and should be labelled differently and only look to further qualify if the role that they fill is not a full role, and if it is not the full role, then it is separate and should be defined differently. For Australia they have a Governor-General of Australia (Q610669) and when not filled they have an administrator of the Government (Q4683598).  — billinghurst sDrewth 01:45, 19 March 2017 (UTC)
The Constitution states prime minister (then the ministers based on predefined orders) is acting as president when the seat is vacant. By law they have full power to exercise anything as a president (but of course politics are complicated). So it seems there's no way to do this with qualifier. — Revi 03:47, 19 March 2017 (UTC)
I am not an expert in South Korean constitutional law, but it sounds in this case that this person is not "The President", but still just "The Prime Minister", and part of the duties and powers of the Prime Minister is to exercise the powers of the Presidency when that position is vacant. In this case, it might not be appropriate to list them as "President" at all and it might not be appropriate to list them as such. Perhaps a South Korean equivalent object to acting president (Q3153784) might be a way forward if we want to track this? Lankiveil (talk) 04:53, 19 March 2017 (UTC).
Maybe. I'll stick to that. — Revi 05:29, 19 March 2017 (UTC)
If there is a prescribed position in the constitution, then create it, and it sounds as it sits there as a type of w:dormant commission. Billinghurst 06:52, 19 March 2017 (UTC)
Yeah, it depends. In general, I'd qualify it with P794 (P794) acting president (Q3153784). At least that is the solution suggested for other offices at Property talk:P39.
--- Jura 06:58, 19 March 2017 (UTC)
This section was archived on a request by: — Revi 05:29, 19 March 2017 (UTC)

Russian speaker needed

Please see: Wikidata:Requests for deletions#Q28954511. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 22:25, 18 March 2017 (UTC)

  Done--Ymblanter (talk) 23:10, 18 March 2017 (UTC)
This section was archived on a request by: Thank you, Ymblanter. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 18:55, 19 March 2017 (UTC)

Does country house need merging?

There seems to be country house (Q16884952) and English country house (Q1343246) both of which point at English country house. Should the Wikidata items be merged? And should the result be called "country house" or "English country house". If the latter, what about similar types of buildings in other countries? Pauljmackay (talk) 16:36, 5 March 2017 (UTC)

Well, one of them is a redirect. I thought redirects shouldn't have their item? MechQuester (talk) 16:38, 5 March 2017 (UTC)

It doesn't need merging as it's possible to have country houses outside of the UK. On the other hand English country house (Q1343246) is clearly a subclass of country house (Q16884952). ChristianKl (talk) 18:42, 5 March 2017 (UTC)
It's interesting that the German "Land haus" is in with mansion (Q1802963). I am not convinced of the need for a separate "country house" item between English country house (Q1343246) and mansion (Q1802963), if the only sitelink is to a redirect. Jheald (talk) 08:34, 6 March 2017 (UTC)
The German word is "Landhaus" and not "Land haus" but that's besides the point. The term doesn't say anything about a house being located in Germany or having anything to do with Germany. The term can easily applied to many houses outside of Germany. Most entities that qualify are likely outside of Germany. On the other hand the term "English country house" is quite specific and refers to houses inside of England. Given that it does equal "country house" I have moved the Wikilink to that item. ChristianKl (talk) 09:19, 6 March 2017 (UTC)
So you've just broken all the interwiki links that "Landhaus" previously had. Is that really an improvement? It's part of what Wikidata is, that there's a bit of elasticity in the concepts that our items match to. The question was not whether "Landhaus" was a good match for "English country house" -- there's already an article "English country house" on dewiki. The question is whether "Landhaus" (and country house, generally) is a good enough match for mansion (Q1802963), to be worth keeping the interwiki links together. That, to me, is a much more evenly balanced question. Jheald (talk) 09:59, 6 March 2017 (UTC)
You can have a mansion that's in a city. Being in a city doesn't conflict with the concept of what a mansion happens to be. It does conflict with the concept of a "country house" or a "Landhaus". En.Wiki says "Fifth Avenue in New York City, was lined with mansions". That shows to me that a different thing than "Landhaus" is meant.
Given that people can specify the identity of a building via P31 it's useful to have the labels of different languages mean the same thing even when that means that there are less interwiki links. ChristianKl (talk) 11:14, 6 March 2017 (UTC)
A country house doesn't cease to be such just because someone moves an administrative line on a map. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 20:50, 6 March 2017 (UTC)
The linked controlled vocabulary says: "Note: Houses in the country as opposed to an urban area, especially houses that are large, have substantial property, and are used seasonally." It's not simply the architecture of the house but whether it's in the country or the city matters. ChristianKl (talk) 14:55, 7 March 2017 (UTC)
You appear to be confusing (or at least making free with the ambiguity between) the meanings of different phrases. A building that is in a city may still be in the country. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 00:03, 14 March 2017 (UTC)

Upcoming changes

There are a lot of small changes happening in the next couple of weeks, and I wanted to give you all a quick heads-up about them. Please share this information with other people/languages/projects that will be interested:

  • There's a change to how columns in reference lists are handled, at the request of the German Wikipedia. This change will improve accessibility by automatically formatting long lists of <ref>s into columns, based on each reader's screen width.
    • What you need to do: Nothing visible is happening now. If your project uses the normal <references /> tag (or doesn't really use refs at all), then file a Phabricator task or just tell me, and I'll get your wiki on the list for the next config change. If your project uses a "reflist" template to create columns, then please consider deprecating it, or update the template to work with the new feature.
    • I'm assuming that this won't affect Wikidata much, but if I'm wrong, then please let me know. :-)
  • The label on the "Save changes" button will change on most smaller projects tomorrow (Wednesday) to say "Publish page". This has been discussed for years, is supported by user research, and is meant to be clearer for new contributors. (Most of us who have been editing for years don't even look at the button any more, and we all already know that all of our changes can be seen by anyone on the internet, so this doesn't really affect us.)
    • If you have questions or encounter problems (e.g., a bad translation, problems fixing the documentation, etc.), then please tell me as soon as possible.
    • When we split "Save page" into "Save page" and "Save changes" last August, a couple of communities wondered whether a local label would be possible. (For example, someone at the English Wikipedia asked if different namespaces could have different labels [answer: not technically possible], and the Chinese Wikipedia has some extra language on their "Save page" button [about the importance of previewing, I think].) Whether the Legal team can agree to a change may depend upon the language/country involved, so please ask me first if you have any questions.
  • As part of the ongoing, years-long user-interface standardization project, the color and shape of the "Save changes" (or now "Publish page"), "Show preview" and "Show changes" buttons on some desktop wikitext editors will change. The buttons will be bigger and easier to find, and the "Save" button will be bright blue. (phab:T111088) Unfortunately, it is not technically possible to completely override this change and restore the appearance of the old buttons for either your account or an entire site.
  • Do you all remember last April, when nobody could edit for about 30 minutes twice, because of some work that Technical Ops was doing on the servers? The same kind of planned maintenance is happening again. It's currently scheduled for Wednesday, April 19th and Wednesday, May 3rd. The time of day is unknown, but it will probably afternoon in Europe and morning in North America. This will be announced repeatedly, but please mark your calendars now.

That's everything on my mind at the moment, but I may have forgotten something. If you have questions (about this or any other WMF work), then please {{Ping}} me, and I'll see what I can find out for you. Thanks, Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 19:06, 13 March 2017 (UTC)

Stray vs. feral animals

The topic of ru:Бездомные животные seems to be more concerned with stray animals, than feral (Q2739176), and the other articles to which that links it. Can someone check, please? Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 21:14, 13 March 2017 (UTC)

Yes, this is correct.--Ymblanter (talk) 21:28, 13 March 2017 (UTC)

Wikimedia project pages matrix

Hello! I have coded a bot to generate this table of labels for common Wikimedia project pages (Categories, templates, lists, disambiguations and Wikinews articles). There are still a lot of gaps and some translations are poor and "automatic", mostly those that include ':' (probably they were produced using interwiki as a translator). What is the best way to contact translators and improve the table coverage? Thanks. Emijrp (talk) 21:31, 13 March 2017 (UTC)

Local Wikipedias, local Project chats (bad idea, probably). --Edgars2007 (talk) 07:20, 14 March 2017 (UTC)

Years in non-(Western) Arabic numerals

I recently became aware of entries like 2221 (Q28913545) or 2229 (Q28913554) (the latter likely should be "2229") on future years, created by User:PokestarFan, that contain the same label for hundreds of languages (here "2221"). While for most of those languages that's indeed the correct label, some use non-Arabic (or Eastern Arabic) numerals and thus different labels for that year, including Latin, Farsi, Bengali and Nepali, among others. I have discussed the issue with PokestarFan until he considered it "fixed" without changing any of the incorrect labels. What's the best way forward? For many of those languages I can't even tell what numerals they might use to refer to future years (literary Chinese?). Thus I'm tempted to simply revert all labels, and those that are definitely correct can then be individually re-added. Thoughts? Huon (talk) 22:46, 13 March 2017 (UTC)

How many of these did he create? I would revert/remove all wrong labels, and ask him to stop. 2017 (Q25290) could help to know when is correct to use Arabic numerals, as I assume it is an item reviewed by humans. Emijrp (talk) 23:10, 13 March 2017 (UTC)
Pasleim's PLbot seems to be addressing this already. Nonetheless, comparison of these year items with Q25290 also shows that they lack a description (though Q25290's could be better), calendar (also lacking in Q25290) and various other properties. Perhaps we ought to start by documenting, on project page, what a "good" year item would contain? Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 23:37, 13 March 2017 (UTC)
I can attest to the Chinese labels as incorrect. MechQuester (talk) 00:43, 14 March 2017 (UTC)
@PokestarFan: can we talk about your edits? MechQuester (talk) 00:48, 14 March 2017 (UTC)

Could someone change all instances of 2221 to 2229 on 2229 (Q28913554)? Also, why is Buryat displaying as "буряад", Adghye as "Адыгэбзэ", Old Korean as "한국어 (조선)", Arabized Kurdish as "كوردي (عەرەبی)‏", Lak as "лакку", Moldovan/Romanian in Cyrillic as "молдовеняскэ", and Tamazigh as "ⵜⴰⵛⵍⵃⵉⵜ"? —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 04:53, 14 March 2017 (UTC)

Perhaps they all need to be localized to English. Also the label for what you called 'Old Korean' refers to Korean as spoken in the North. Mahir256 (talk) 05:52, 14 March 2017 (UTC)

┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘ @Huon, Emijrp, MechQuester, Koavf, Mahir256: I will stop automating things and just focus on enwiki articles and adding as much info as possible. PokestarFan (talk) (My Contribs) 13:35, 14 March 2017 (UTC)

@PokestarFan: Everyone makes mistakes. If you can please fix 2229 (Q28913554) then that would be a good start. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 17:56, 14 March 2017 (UTC)

Fusion of en:Islamic dress in Europe and de:Kopftuchstreit

Can someone fusion en:Islamic dress in Europe and de:Kopftuchstreit 88.70.33.10 10:16, 14 March 2017 (UTC)

@88.70.33.10: Excuse me, what are you asking? Are you asking to include them on an item, or merge the items that contain the said articles? PokestarFan (talk) (My Contribs) 13:38, 14 March 2017 (UTC)
The latter covers the whole world, for instance Egypt, while the former is Europe-only. Syced (talk) 14:11, 14 March 2017 (UTC)

Correct relation for a (District of England) -> a (Borough council)

What is the correct property to map an item in class non-metropolitan district (Q1187580) to an item in class district council (Q16690653) ?

The inverse relationship is straightforward, there seems to be consensus to express it as e.g.:

Redditch Borough Council (Q14978996)applies to jurisdiction (P1001)Redditch (Q21496675).

But, in the other direction, e.g. to map Redditch (Q21496675) to Redditch Borough Council (Q14978996), which one, two, or three of legislative body (P194), executive body (P208), or authority (P797) should apply? Jheald (talk) 17:54, 14 March 2017 (UTC)

My team is hiring

Quick heads up: There are two job openings related to c:Commons:Structured data at the WMF. See c:Commons talk:Structured data#CLs are hiring.21 (my team) and the following section (a product manager) for more information and links. Neither position requires moving to San Francisco. Please share this information, especially with any experienced contributors whom you believe are qualified. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 05:03, 12 March 2017 (UTC)

For which role? As a general piece of advice, hard requirements are either listed, or they aren't that hard. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 13:02, 13 March 2017 (UTC)
@Jura1: If there are good candidates with knowledge of Wikidata and Commons I will put my weight behind such a candidate. However I don't think this is a hard requirement. I wasn't a contributor to Wikipedia either when I started 5 years ago but I think I managed to get into things fairly quickly ;-) Besides that: the more good people from here apply the higher the chance that we'll find someone fitting with Wikidata knowledge. --Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) (talk) 15:11, 13 March 2017 (UTC)
  • @Whatamidoing (WMF), Lydia Pintscher (WMDE): I wouldn't be in the frame for any of the jobs, but it does seem strange to publish these openings without (as far as I can see) any hint of the salary, or even the salary range. Is this normal for WMF? In terms of real pounds and euros, how much are you thinking of offering? Jheald (talk) 23:39, 13 March 2017 (UTC)
    • Jura, I'm not on the hiring committee, so I will tell you what I think plainly: If you (any of you) are a Wikimedian, and if you think that you would be good at this work, then you should apply. Please. Do not let unimportant factors like age (MediaWiki's API was written by a 16 year old), location (we have people all over the world), or formal education (your accomplishments matter more than a diploma) prevent you from applying. Do not even let "the requirements" stop you. I want the hiring committee to be choosing from among a hundred good candidates, and to have a hundred application letters that show them a hundred important skills that they'd never thought of.
      IMO the ideal candidate will already be familiar with Wikidata; if not, however, then we will have to teach that person about Wikidata promptly. I think that's achievable, and I hope that several of you will be thinking about what you want this person to learn first.
      Jheald, salary and benefits depend (heavily) upon your location. In general, I have the impression that community liaisons get paid "middle class" amounts (middle class in whatever your country is), and that product managers get paid a little more than CLs. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 23:56, 13 March 2017 (UTC)
  • From a Wikidata perspective, one might not want devs from Wikidata apply, as otherwise Wikidata development might be taken back ;)
    Still I think it's a key factor that persons active on this understand how Wikidata works and have some personal experience with it. There is much to be gained from these two parts of Wikimedia functioning together and avoiding redundancy.
    --- Jura 21:49, 14 March 2017 (UTC)

Adoptive vs. biological parents

Do we have any method for handling adoptive/biological parent relationships? father (P22) is described as "male parent", which could apply for either. --Hardwigg (talk) 07:16, 14 March 2017 (UTC)

Use P22 with a qualifier, "significant event" = "adoption". Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 10:00, 14 March 2017 (UTC)
significant event (P793) can be used as a qualifier? What does that use mean in general, precisely? --Yair rand (talk) 15:08, 14 March 2017 (UTC)
Don't use P22 for an adoptive father, because then you'll break the constraint that a person has only one biological father (general case). We have relative (P1038) used with qualifier kinship to subject (P1039) for this. --Melderick (talk) 16:26, 15 March 2017 (UTC)
adoptive parent (Q20746742) for the value of the qualifier. --Melderick (talk) 16:32, 15 March 2017 (UTC)

Template:LinkUser Redirecting to Template:Request for permissions/links

Why does Template:LinkUser redirect to Template:Request for permissions/links? Why can't Template:Request for permissions/links just be moved to Template:LinkUser? PokestarFan (talk) (My Contribs) 13:47, 14 March 2017 (UTC)

It might be some historical reasons, take a look at theit histories. Anyway, does the naming cause any problems? Matěj Suchánek (talk) 15:03, 15 March 2017 (UTC)

Languages not localized in English

In case others didn't see it above, the following languages don't display their English names but their native ones:

  • Buryat displaying as "буряад"
  • Adghye as "Адыгэбзэ"
  • (North) Korean as "한국어 (조선)"
  • Arabized Kurdish as "كوردي (عەرەبی)‏"
  • Lak as "лакку"
  • Moldovan/Romanian in Cyrillic as "молдовеняскэ"
  • Tamazigh as "ⵜⴰⵛⵍⵃⵉⵜ"

Can someone localize these names here? I realize that not every language is going to have entire localization but at the very least, English should. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 17:58, 14 March 2017 (UTC)

Took me a big of digging, but I think I found it. We use CLDR. The list of languages is at https://github.com/wikimedia/mediawiki-extensions-cldr/blob/master/CldrNames/CldrNamesEn.php . Upstream is missing some languages, some of them are at https://github.com/wikimedia/mediawiki-extensions-cldr/blob/master/LocalNames/LocalNamesEn.php
So what we probably need is a list of valid Wikidata language codes (where can I find that one?) and compare each of them with both files and report the missing language codes. While we're at it we can also report the local fallbacks that are now in the upstream file. Multichill (talk) 19:25, 14 March 2017 (UTC)
There's some list of missing translations at phab:T151269. Matěj Suchánek (talk) 15:01, 15 March 2017 (UTC)

Wikimania submission deadline friendly remindner

On 30 March the submission for lectures and workshops will end. Would be great to see some more Wikidata content in the submissions: https://wikimania2017.wikimedia.org/wiki/Submissions - An entry level SPARQL course would be a great thing to share with the rest of the wikiverse for example. --Tobias1984 (talk) 20:36, 14 March 2017 (UTC)

@Tobias1984: Thanks for reminder, I've just started working on new submission SPARQL – a gentle introduction to the Wikidata Query Service. If anyone wants to join and help me, please ping :). Yarl ✉️️  22:24, 14 March 2017 (UTC)
@Yarl: Thanks for submitting a session. I am sure a few experienced people will join the session to help with questions. --Tobias1984 (talk) 17:34, 15 March 2017 (UTC)

Server error

Whenever I launch a request at https://query.wikidata.org I get "Server error". Syced (talk) 10:28, 21 March 2017 (UTC)

I just tested it and it works here. Is it any query? If it is a specific one can you post it here? --Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) (talk) 10:47, 21 March 2017 (UTC)
Sorry it was totally my fault, because I added some browser customization very specific to me. Sorry again for the false alarm! Syced (talk) 11:01, 21 March 2017 (UTC)
This section was archived on a request by: Matěj Suchánek (talk) 12:30, 21 March 2017 (UTC)

Some items have Language links to redirected articles but I can't unlink them since they don't appear on the sitelinks

Example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azure_(color). This page is about the color azure, in the linked language articles for other languages, for Spanish, it links the https://es.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Azur_(color)&redirect=no which is redirected to Azur, the heraldry page. Now, irrelevant of whenever or not the redirection is correct, the page itself doesn't appear in the sitelinks https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q373058#sitelinks-wikipedia. Can anyone figure out what's going on here?

Old style interlink: [[es:Azur (color)]] in english page. --ValterVB (talk) 21:26, 15 March 2017 (UTC)

New grant proposal - digitalisation of the Geoscience Museum

A new step into the digitalisation programme of Brazilian GLAM

This project is an ambitious next step in the GLAM programme being developed in Brazil: the goal now is to scaling up initiatives, with a digitalisation programme in one of the largest museums of the University of São Paulo, the Museu of Geosciences of the Institute of Geosciences.

The idea is to create new contributions here, and use the photos to illustrate entries.

Pleas check more about at and give us your feedback: meta:Grants:Project/Rodrigo Tetsuo Argenton/Digitalisation of the Geoscience Museum

Thank you for the attention. -- Rodrigo Tetsuo Argenton (talk) 22:02, 15 March 2017 (UTC)

SIC code format

I notice that SIC code (P3242) has a regular expression of digits between 1-4 characters. This list from Companies House has many examples of 5 digit codes. Should the regex be updated?

It might also be useful to update the description of that property to suggest more clearly when it should be used.

Pauljmackay (talk) 17:51, 15 March 2017 (UTC)

Checking this lookup suggests the codes could be much longer, e.g. 8 digits. Also I think my point about the UK codes is moot because the numbers are different, so it might be that there should be a new property to represent UK SIC codes? Pauljmackay (talk) 09:35, 16 March 2017 (UTC)

Can I 'pause' my property proposal?

I have made multiple related Wikidata:Property proposals. Can I set status 'pause' to one of these? Use |status=? (I discovered that proposal C is fully depending on outcome of proposal B). -DePiep (talk) 18:41, 15 March 2017 (UTC)

you can set "on hold" as the status. In general with templates go to the template page (such as Template:Property proposal in this case) to see documentation. Hmm, although "on hold" there says it indicates approved which wouldn't be the case... I guess it's ok to leave it with no status for now... ArthurPSmith (talk) 20:16, 15 March 2017 (UTC)
You can simply state that property proposals. I think it would be enough. --Edgars2007 (talk) 07:29, 16 March 2017 (UTC)

How do you identify Wikidata items that refer to a redirect

I am working on a list of people and find that many have an item but they are Wikipedia redirects. When we want to monitor the number of articles, they should not count. How does this work? Are redirects ok ? Thanks, GerardM (talk) 08:26, 16 March 2017 (UTC)

Hi @GerardM: At the moment I think the information that something is a redirect is held only in the traditional MediaWiki databases, not in Wikidata.
So there are basically two options to access it: either write a bot/scraper, or use a tool like m:PetScan/en -- on its Page Properties tab, PetScan I think lets you filter a list for pages that are redirects.
A further thing to keep in mind is that there are different reasons why a page might be a redirect. One is if the page has been moved, but the sitelink on Wikidata has never been changed. Alternatively, the page might be a redirect to a more general page, eg a "Bonnie" -> "Bonnie and Clyde" redirect. On several wikis redirects in this latter class can be marked with a Template:Soft redirect with Wikidata item (Q16956589) template -- which you can also filter for on PetScan. However, this is far from systematically populated as yet.
As an aside, IMO it would be a good thing if known sitelinks to redirects were marked as such, eg with a badge, on their Wikidata pages (though it would need to be a bot job or a system job to keep this up to date). IMO also, when a sitelink is to a "Bonnie" redirect, this should be indicated to users in the WP page sidebar. Sitelinks to rename-redirects should of course be updated. (Again, perhaps a bot job or a system job). Jheald (talk) 15:41, 16 March 2017 (UTC)
@Jheald: With this scritp: mw.loader.load( '//www.wikidata.org/w/index.php?title=User:Matěj_Suchánek/checkSitelinks.js&action=raw&ctype=text/javascript' ); you can check the status of every sitelink of an item. It check if is a redirect, a disambiguation or if the page is deleted. Sometime it's necessary reload the page. --ValterVB (talk) 18:01, 16 March 2017 (UTC)

Understanding constraints

Can someone help me understand why I am seeing these constraint errors?

Type errors:

Format error:

Thanks! - PKM (talk) 20:49, 15 March 2017 (UTC)

Actually plate armor (Q3391846) is a subclass of artificial physical object (Q8205328), but it seems the constraint used a redirect, I see you fixed it, maybe that was the cause of the problem? Koxinga (talk) 20:46, 16 March 2017 (UTC)
Thank you very much for the detailed explanation!
I still get the format error on this report; the problem with <place of publication> is now fixed. - PKM (talk) 01:41, 17 March 2017 (UTC)

Link to how to merge in the "Could not save due to an error." message

Is it possible to add a direct link to Help:Merge in the "Could not save due to an error" message? -- Mdd (talk) 11:42, 16 March 2017 (UTC)

Maybe it is but I wonder if the help page can always be related to an error. By the way, MediaWiki:Wikibase-error-sitelink-already-used already links to it. Matěj Suchánek (talk) 12:37, 16 March 2017 (UTC)
Ok, I understand. In my case I was trying to link an existing Dutch lemma to the English lemma and the message occured. Not that familiar with wikidata , at first (even with my experience) I was unable to find any general information about to do next. -- Mdd (talk) 13:35, 17 March 2017 (UTC)

Strategy 2017

Hi all, it has just come to my attention that Phase 1 of the strategy 2017 process will end in Berlin at the end of this month (silly me, I thought it would begin there). Please air your thoughts about where Wikidata will be in 2030 on the talk page over here: Wikidata:Strategy 2017. Jane023 (talk) 10:01, 17 March 2017 (UTC)

Arbitary access to badge data?

Would SKS please explain the process/codes/thing-a-mes for getting arbitrary access to the badge data? eg. For a list at enWS, I am wishing to utilise a template to arbitrarily extract data, including the badges data. The badge data has me flummoxed. For an example item Emancipate your colonies! (Q19094713) Thanks.  — billinghurst sDrewth 15:56, 11 March 2017 (UTC)

@Aude: ???  — billinghurst sDrewth 01:30, 13 March 2017 (UTC)
I don't believe we have a specific function to get badges. You should be able to get them if you load the whole item though. If you would like to see a specific function can you please open a ticket on phabricator? --Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) (talk) 13:11, 18 March 2017 (UTC)

Pages and volume of a journal article

Should page(s) (P304) and volume (P478) be qualifiers of published in (P1433) (as I had them on A revised check-list of the genus Zygaena Fabricius, 1775 (Lepidoptera: Zygaenidae, Zygaeninae), based on the biospecies concept (Q28924047)) or separate first-level properties? Consider what would happen for an article (re-)published in a second journal. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 10:06, 13 March 2017 (UTC)

That is what we do with all the DNB biographical articles, eg. Webb, Alfred John (Q19063348), and I have been doing with articles from the Journal of the Statistical and Social Inquiry Society of Ireland., eg. The progress of the colony of Victoria (Q28933779). It doesn't make sense to be a primary factor as it is contingent upon something else.  — billinghurst sDrewth 11:12, 13 March 2017 (UTC)

The Source MetaData WikiProject does not exist. Please correct the name. --Succu (talk) 13:29, 13 March 2017 (UTC)

Republication of an article = new item. This is the same principle as for edition: for each edition we have a different item. Snipre (talk) 16:58, 13 March 2017 (UTC)
If it is a simple case of reprinting the original text and images in a new journal, or in a book, it is not a new item, any more than we have separate items for the paper and web verisons, or HTML and PDF renderings, of the first publicaton. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 17:37, 13 March 2017 (UTC)
Oh your argument is about the editions, not the citation.

Again this is a situation of separating the intellectual concept/literary work from the edition(s) (similar discussion above). There will be an item for the concept/literary work, and an item for each edition. It is the editions that have the "published in" component. One does have to consider how the first presentation can be represented to its first appearance.

It is such a can of worms, and still problematic for the Wikisources to pair editions with articles and have wikilinks, etc. ...  — billinghurst sDrewth 23:23, 13 March 2017 (UTC)

"your argument is about the editions, not the citation" Not at all. I made no distinction between or reference to eiter a citation or an edition in my original question. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 00:08, 14 March 2017 (UTC)
Are you refering to this change? You gave no hint why Snipres approach isn't reasonable. A lot of properties could be different e.g, the use of a different typeset resulting in a different page count. Or the republishing journal used a different paper weight printed at sheets with special colors, ... --Succu (talk) 22:17, 14 March 2017 (UTC)
While what was done at Q:28924047 is an approach, do we really want to invent the wheel and make it square? There should be a good reason to depart from a standard/consensus. If it is republished, just add a second "published in", and add "series ordinal" to each.  — billinghurst sDrewth 01:20, 15 March 2017 (UTC)
You don't have to reinvent the wheel. We have Help:Sources. A major implementation of this is Source MetaData. --Succu (talk) 10:21, 15 March 2017 (UTC)
What relevance does Help:Sources have to this issue? What does it say, specifically, that supports or requires page numbers and volume to be top-level properties, not qualifiers? Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 10:30, 15 March 2017 (UTC)
@Pigsonthewing: If you pull back "page(s)" as a top level item on its own, what does it mean? Garbage data without it being a qualifer for the publication, the volume, etc. Any top level item has be standalone pertinent.  — billinghurst sDrewth 12:45, 15 March 2017 (UTC)
Did you ever used the tool I mentiond? It was used to create hundred thousands items about articles. --Succu (talk) 14:12, 15 March 2017 (UTC)
The question, which you have ignored, was "What relevance does Help:Sources have to this issue? What does it say, specifically, that supports or requires page numbers and volume to be top-level properties, not qualifiers?". Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 22:21, 15 March 2017 (UTC)
Try Quora (Q51711), but the correct solution was given to you in this thread. --Succu (talk) 22:26, 15 March 2017 (UTC)
You were recently upbraided, on this very page, for your obstinate refusal to give a straight answer in defence of your actions (your behaviour was described as "ludicrous", "passive-aggressive" and "bullying"); yet you do so again. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 22:44, 15 March 2017 (UTC)
Mr. Mabbett, do have some arguments to settle this topic? --Succu (talk) 22:51, 15 March 2017 (UTC)
Waiting for you to answer the question (now asked here for the third time): "What relevance does Help:Sources have to this issue? What does it say, specifically, that supports or requires page numbers and volume to be top-level properties, not qualifiers?". Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 23:05, 15 March 2017 (UTC)
Here's Succu's answer, since reverted by another editor. It seems that he won't take this seriously. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 09:08, 16 March 2017 (UTC)
@billinghurst: For a republication in a new journal, you have a new set of properties like published in (P1433), issue (P433), publication date (P577), page(s) (P304), DOI (P356) and volume (P478). Then all usual identifiers will be doubled. Do you really want to handle all these properties in one item ? Just imagine the code you need to extract only the data of the original article or of the republication in WP for example: with your system you have to o through all statements and values and retrieve corresponding data according to the qualifiers. Just a nightmare. Two items is a little work at the begining but it is simpler to use later because the extracting code is more easy to write and to modify. Snipre (talk) 18:27, 15 March 2017 (UTC)
Even if there is only one edition, the page number(s) and volume belong as qualifiers. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 22:22, 15 March 2017 (UTC)
Why, Mr. Mabbett? --Succu (talk) 23:01, 15 March 2017 (UTC)
Because he is correct and you are not. Thanks, GerardM (talk) 05:37, 16 March 2017 (UTC)

It seems clear from the above that, with the exception of only one editor, who has offered no meaningful explanation, that page(s) (P304) and volume (P478) should be qualifiers of published in (P1433). Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 20:23, 17 March 2017 (UTC)

Actually, I am counting three versus two. If I add myself (I would tend to side with Succu and Snipre, but don't care all that much), this would be three versus three. This seems a ridiculously low number for an issue that so many isers have to deal with. - Brya (talk) 05:08, 18 March 2017 (UTC)
At the moment we have 954.224 items with published in (P1433). 599.476 items use volume (P478) as a property. 12.406 items use volume (P478) as a quaifier. Looks like this usage was introduced for the handling of ruwikisource. --Succu (talk) 10:56, 18 March 2017 (UTC)

New SPARQL query limit?

We now have a higher SPARQL query time-out limit? 60 seconds (I didn't time my unsuccesfull query)? --Edgars2007 (talk) 15:42, 13 March 2017 (UTC)

Yes. Matěj Suchánek (talk) 17:30, 13 March 2017 (UTC)
Yeah. However we might need to turn it back. There were a few issues with the server after the change was made. I'll have to talk to Stas to see if they are resolved or if we have to turn it back for now. --Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) (talk) 17:52, 13 March 2017 (UTC)
OK, thanks. --Edgars2007 (talk) 07:15, 14 March 2017 (UTC)
It looks like things are good at the moment. We'll keep an eye on it though. --Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) (talk) 13:13, 18 March 2017 (UTC)

DMOZ shutdown

dmoz.org has announced that it is shutting down, with immediate effect, but the site remains up for the time being, and RDF dumps of the core data are still available. The material is available under this license. I believe it contains lots of data that is of potential interest to the free data movement, and might well qualify as a new Wikimedia project or Wikidata subproject. Is the data there of any use here? -- The Anome (talk) 11:12, 16 March 2017 (UTC)

@The Anome: There was discussion on this two weeks ago which came to little consensus except to adjust the existing Curlie ID (P998) formatter URL (P1630) (or add a third-party formatter URL (P3303)) to point to the Internet Archive. I'm sure few people will have objections to importing the rest of the database, assuming that the appropriate disambiguation can be done. Mahir256 (talk) 22:45, 16 March 2017 (UTC)
Thanks. I'm glad people are working on this. Thank goodness for the Internet Archive. -- The Anome (talk) 08:39, 17 March 2017 (UTC)
Update: it looks like Archive Team are also aware of this: [9], [10] -- The Anome (talk) 08:43, 17 March 2017 (UTC)
@The Anome, Mahir256: anyway, I nominated that property for deletion. --Liuxinyu970226 (talk) 10:47, 17 March 2017 (UTC)
@Liuxinyu970226, Mahir256: I've just stated my opposition to deletion in that PfD. Thanks for bringing it to attention here. -- The Anome (talk) 11:04, 17 March 2017 (UTC)

@The Anome: Please don't think that your efforts are inappropriate or unappreciated but did you see that I posted the above thread, posted to m:talk:Interwiki links, changed w:en:Template:DMOZ, remarked on Phabricator and Gerrit about removing DMOZ, commented on m:Wikinexus, emailed Jason at Archive Team, posted the thread on Slashdot, etc.? I don't mean to be rude but it seems like you did not really do any due diligence to figure out what the community is already doing before nominating this for deletion or even posting this thread. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 18:36, 17 March 2017 (UTC)

Embarrassing lack of due diligence on my part: @Liuxinyu970226: you proposed deletion... Excuse me for being so hasty. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 18:40, 17 March 2017 (UTC)
@Koavf: Ouch. You are criticizing the wrong target here: I'm actively advocating for the property to be kept, and for the data itself to be mirrored here to keep it preserved for posterity, just in case. We're working on the same side here. Thank you for your work elsewhere on this issue: it's great work that benefits the community. -- The Anome (talk) 07:51, 18 March 2017 (UTC)
@The Anome: Agreed--I apologize. That's why I made my second edit rapidly after the first. Thank you. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 16:30, 18 March 2017 (UTC)

Can you use the Query Service to find items with no P31?

Self-explanatory. PokestarFan (talk) (My Contribs) 01:12, 17 March 2017 (UTC)

I would have said the following. But it does not seem to work as expected, indeed... Syced (talk) 08:27, 17 March 2017 (UTC)
SELECT ?item
WHERE
{
	MINUS{
      ?item wdt:P31 ?type.
    }
}
Try it!
?item needs some definition first (as it doesn't make sense to subtract something we don't know). Also, missing instance of (P31) is ok if there is subclass of (P279) already:
SELECT ?item WHERE {
  ?item wikibase:sitelinks [] .
  MINUS { ?item (wdt:P31|wdt:P279) [] } .
} LIMIT 1000
Try it!
Matěj Suchánek (talk) 08:44, 17 March 2017 (UTC)

Items with no statement

Hoi, I noticed that the number of items with no statement is less than 10%. This is quite an achievement given that many items are added all the time. Thanks, GerardM (talk) 09:12, 17 March 2017 (UTC)

Next level is to group these by date of creation - I think a large part of that 10% is still from the "great mass 2013 upload drive". Jane023 (talk) 10:50, 17 March 2017 (UTC)
Per this data, we ended 2013 with id around Q15500000. This query says there are ~1,226,751 items without statements created before 2014. (1,226,751 / 2,487,761) × 100% = 49.3% (ie. almost half). Matěj Suchánek (talk) 11:06, 17 March 2017 (UTC)
Interesting! I have fixed enough of these to think that this difficult group of zero statement items are probably concepts that don't lend themselves to common P31 choices. Something like trending topics of some sort, or historical names of art movements for example. Jane023 (talk) 18:40, 17 March 2017 (UTC)

We invite you to join the movement strategy conversation (now through April 15)

This message, "We invite you to join the movement strategy conversation (now through April 15)", was sent through multiple channels by Gregory Varnum on 15 and 16 of March 2017 to village pumps, affiliate talk pages, movement mailing lists, and MassMessage groups. A similar message was sent by Nicole Ebber to organized groups and their mailing lists on 15 of March 2017. This version of the message is available for translation and documentation purposes

Dear Wikimedians/Wikipedians:

Today we are starting a broad discussion to define Wikimedia's future role in the world and develop a collaborative strategy to fulfill that role. You are warmly invited to join the conversation.

There are many ways to participate, by joining an existing conversation or starting your own:

Track A (organized groups): Discussions with your affiliate, committee or other organized group (these are groups that support the Wikimedia movement).

Track B (individual contributors): On Meta or your local language or project wiki.

This is the first of three conversations, and it will run between now and April 15. The purpose of cycle 1 is to discuss the future of the movement and generate major themes around potential directions. What do we want to build or achieve together over the next 15 years?

We welcome you, as we create this conversation together, and look forward to broad and diverse participation from all parts of our movement.

Sincerely,

Nicole Ebber (Track A Lead), Jaime Anstee (Track B Lead), & the engagement support teams

05:09, 18 March 2017 (UTC)

Merge

I was unable to merge Julius Lovy (Q29017199) and Julius Lovy (Q16947552). 82.199.129.116 23:33, 23 March 2017 (UTC)

  Done MechQuester (talk) 00:24, 24 March 2017 (UTC)
This section was archived on a request by: Matěj Suchánek (talk) 14:06, 24 March 2017 (UTC)

Item quality and the number of sitelinks

Wikidata:Item quality is currently fairly vague about how to measure the quality induced by sitelinks:

  • (A): All appropriate sitelinks to corresponding Wikimedia projects
  • (B): Most appropriate sitelinks to corresponding Wikimedia projects
  • (C): Some sitelinks to corresponding Wikimedia projects
  • (D): At least one sitelink (if applicable)
  • (E): everything else.

There are probably at least two ways of measuring this:

  • 1. In a relative way: does the item include sitelinks to all articles Wikipedias have on the same concept. If there are 10 sitelinks on the item and 1 sitelink on some duplicate item, this should be fine for (B)/(C)/(D)/(E). Assessing this would require spot checking for duplicates.
  • 2. In an absolute way: does the item include sitelinks to all of the some 500 WMF sites we could link. If there are 10 sitelinks on the item and 1 sitelink on some duplicate item, this might only be fine for (D)/(E) and maybe (C). An automated calculation can assess this (WDQS has a simplified way to check it).

The relative way (1) measures something Wikidata contributors build and can fix, the absolute way (2) is just a measurement about a gap in one or the other Wikipedia. What do you think?
--- Jura 15:26, 12 March 2017 (UTC)

I thinkt the relative way is better, because otherwise you will never get class (A) items. You can't force small wikipedias to create a page about a person that is totally not relevant for their language, like a local rapper. Q.Zanden questions? 16:43, 12 March 2017 (UTC)
Wikidata:Item quality already states this in a "relative" way. To me, the "absolute" proposal is a nonstarter. It just doesn't make any sense. This conversation would be better held on Wikidata talk:Item quality where we can discuss the specific language to include in the criteria. All are welcome to join us there where we are addressing all sorts of questions like this one. --EpochFail (talk) 13:37, 15 March 2017 (UTC)
This discussion about sitelinks as a measure of quality is silly. There are lots of quality items that do not have any sitelinks at all, because they are closely related to something that does, but they have a different purpose on Wikidata - just look at all the "trees" vs "fruits of those trees" vs "seeds of those trees" etc. A typical Wikipedia article would just bundle all those concepts together, which is fine. Jane023 (talk) 15:58, 16 March 2017 (UTC)
Slightly off-topic, is there any publicly available tool by Wikimedia that can be used to measure the (relative/absolute) quality of individual items by the above definition, i.e., the input to the tool is item number and the output is its quality? Jsamwrites (talk) 12:39, 18 March 2017 (UTC)
No. That is what we are trying to get to with the above. --Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) (talk) 13:12, 18 March 2017 (UTC)
What is it that you are trying to achieve. It escapes me and arguments are made for another approach but it does not get attention. Neither is there any response to the arguments against this approach. Thanks, GerardM (talk) 09:07, 19 March 2017 (UTC)
Silly or not, I don't think it's entirely clear what the item quality criteria currently state, especially as actually checking for duplicates of the same concept doesn't seem to be an obvious thing to do. Some seem to be insist to do things in a Wikipedia way .. maybe we should follow the suggestion made earlier and attempt to allocate Wikidata development resources to more important issues.
--- Jura 08:56, 19 March 2017 (UTC)

Quality is not measured in a Wikipedia way

The current proposal for quality is imho wrong. Quality is in the consistency of the data and in the linking to sources. A source may be a Wikipedia but for an author for instance a link to VIAF is more relevant; it establishes an identify in the international libraries. Data for an item like an author is associated with categories; the data the categories stand for should be included in Wikidata. Wikidata holds an edge over a Wikipedia when it knows about more articles that should be in the category.

When specific data on an item can be qualified; the qualifications are an integral part of the quality involved. Consequently it is great to know that a person was a ruler for a specific kingdom or sultanate, knowing dates and predecessor and successor make for great quality.

It is important to remember how young and incomplete Wikidata is. Things are improving rapidly but the relevance is mostly in the data itself. When language is considered, the fact that we hold the complete structure of Chinese places and their administrative entities makes it of high quality. The fact that we do not have English labels is hardly relevant. Collaboration on maintaining this data is much more relevant. When we think that language support is vital in assessing quality, it follows that attention is given to the usability of other languages. Showing a Q-number when a label is missing is something that needs urgent remediation. There is always at least one label.

The current approach to "quality" is one where single items are considered in isolation. It is much better to consider quality as a function of "set theory". It is more important to consider quality as one of connectedness to other items and sources. Quality can be expressed in the completeness of statements. Arguably when a Wikipedia article has Wikilinks including red links, Wikidata could have an associated statement. Thanks, GerardM (talk) 06:44, 13 March 2017 (UTC)

One thing that occurred to me was that a tool might be quite interesting that determined how many of the bluelinks in the first paragraph of a Wikipedia article were accounted for (and which were not) by statements on the corresponding Wikidata item.
Are there particular types of relationships that aren't yet being well captured? And are there items where the proportion is particularly low? This I think might be interesting to look at. Jheald (talk) 09:39, 13 March 2017 (UTC)
Yes I am inclined to agree with this. The trick is identifying the links you are talking about - I assume "instance of" and maybe "from xxx country", but maybe also more specific things regarding that article's "claim to fame" on that specific language Wikipedia. Jane023 (talk) 16:01, 16 March 2017 (UTC)
There is much data in categories that could be harvested on a regular basis. They reflect data as "educated at" "faculty at" etc. For many categories there are definitions in place (in Wikidata) that can be used for automation. When this is done for all Wikipedias it would improve Wikidata over the quality of single categories, Thanks, GerardM (talk) 16:16, 16 March 2017 (UTC)
Wikidata would be better served with more wiki links and red links. We could do a better job capturing data from categories; there are two obvious strategies and the easiest is to cooperate with the good people of DBpedia. Thanks, GerardM (talk) 14:48, 13 March 2017 (UTC)

Should we have a property for "religion" or "religious affiliation"?

I'd like to invite folks to participate in the discussion here: Property talk:P140#Using most specific information and proposed label change.--Pharos (talk) 23:52, 18 March 2017 (UTC)

Query regarding the descriptions of famous CEO's

Hi all,

I was looking at the description of some of the famous CEO's like Marissa Mayer,Tim Cook etc.

https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q265852 -> American business executive https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q14086 -> American business executive and engineer.

I guess it would be better to have specific description like CEO of Yahoo! for Marissa Mayer, CEO of Apple Inc for Tim Cook. However Sundar Pichai(https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q3503829) has Google CEO as description. Can anyone please let me know why is there's disparity in description for different CEO's?

I guess it would be better to have consistent descriptions for all CEO's.

Thanks in advance.

Subramanyam  – The preceding unsigned comment was added by 2001:4998:EFEB:7805:0:0:0:1020 (talk • contribs) at 13. 2. 2017, 04:37‎ (UTC).

I don't see any immediate profit of changing one machine-generated descriptions to another machine-generated description. Well, there is a space to improve, like inserting company names, main roles in films, genres etc. to make namesakes more distinct. --Lockal (talk) 19:07, 19 March 2017 (UTC)

Abstract classes

So, those here who have a background in software development may be familiar with the concept of "abstract classes" from object-oriented programming languages (e.g. in Java). An abstract class is a class which can have subclasses but cannot itself be directly instantiated. In Wikidata terms, this would be saying that certain items should only be the targets of P279 not P31. So, do we have a way to express that constraint right now? Or would it make sense to introduce such machinery? Some items are so abstract that they should not have any direct instances only subclasses, e.g. geographical feature (Q618123) – anything directly an instance of that should be made an instance of some more specific subclass instead. (The next question is, if we don't have any such machinery at present, and if we should, what would be the mechanics of implementing it? e.g., we could introduce an item "Wikidata abstract class", make abstract classes P31 (or maybe P1552) of "Wikidata abstract class", and then add a constraint to P31 saying that target items must not be P31/P1552 "Wikidata abstract class".) SJK (talk) 11:55, 19 March 2017 (UTC)

Though it is very interesting to have the flexibility provided by Wikidata, it's equally important to have the ability to add constraints in cases similar to the use cases specified by SJK. There are many other examples, where you can't create instances (e.g., programming paradigm). Properties like official website (P856) do provide restrictions on values by only allowing values that respect the given format. Such form of restrictions need to be extended to items, may be in the long run. Jsamwrites (talk) 12:22, 19 March 2017 (UTC)
@Jsamwrites: Yes, I think your idea of somehow putting constraints on items is a good one. To give another example, consider an entity like local government area of Australia (Q1867183). Any instance of that class (and its subclasses) should have country (P17) → Australia (Q408), and there should be some way to declare that constraint on local government area of Australia (Q1867183). There are heaps of other examples where "constraints on items" could be used. Now, the question is whether it should be encoded in properties, or as a template on the talk page like we currently have for properties. The former is the ideal solution; however, the fact that we are still using the later demonstrates that the former solution has some difficulties (some complex constraints are far easier to encode in a template than in a claim, and the template displays it in a user-friendly way, something constraints-as-claims can't really do right now). I wonder how hard it would be to take the exist constraint templates/constraint violations reports/etc and repurpose them for items? All that said, I think my original idea of a "Wikidata abstract class" can possibly be implemented with just property constraints, and so I still would like to pursue that as a property constraint until item constraints become available. SJK (talk) 12:57, 19 March 2017 (UTC)
  Support Matěj Suchánek (talk) 15:46, 20 March 2017 (UTC)

Writing to Wikidata using Bot / REST APIs

Hi All,

I would like to add new 'file format' entries for the property 'Readable file format-P1072' in an item page 'Adobe Photoshop-Q129793' and I have to do similar operations on many softwares' item pages. I would like to know if its a must to create a Bot to do this operation or just using RESTAPIs will do the job. Please let me know.

Thanks in advance. Sharmeelaashwin (talk) 12:21, 20 March 2017 (UTC)

I demand justice ! (just a clickbait title for better justice properties)

Looking at politicians biographies, I noticed that many had been condamned for libel, had attacked others for libel… by a judge from a certain court, had paid damages for a certain amount. I added one for a French politician, that was swiftly reverted (with no explanations so far, even though I asked for some). Thus a couple of questions:

  • Has it been debated and set aside due to privacy issues ?
  • Can we add this information for public (especially political) figures ?
  • Can we perhaps do better, than the current situation (by adding properties to simplify description) ? A wikiproject/taskforce ?

--Teolemon (talk) 09:42, 20 March 2017 (UTC)

We have, as yet, no equivalent of the en:Wikipedia:Biographies of living persons policy (Wikidata:Living people exists as an unadopted proposal), but are nonetheless bound by this Wikimedia Foundation resolution: foundation:Resolution:Biographies of living people. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 12:03, 20 March 2017 (UTC)

Weekly Summary #252

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

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here.

A challenge to us all

Hoi, suppose you are the project manager that needs to report on quite a big project. For instance the "100 women" that the BBC features each year. Arguably all those women have merit and they are at least notable enough to have a Wikidata entry. At this moment there are four years. What queries would you want to monitor the progress of the project. For your information there are four queries I use in a Listeria page for each of the years.

The objective of this challenge is to really consider how Wikidata can be used to manage our editathons, our projects. So please consider what it is that you need, what the prerequisites are and how multiple queries give the insight necessary to report to a GLAM / a BBC / a chapter or the WMF. Thanks, GerardM (talk) 18:39, 19 March 2017 (UTC)

PS Not all the items exist yet. I am adding them based on the information in the en.wp article.

Update

I have added all the missing items for 2016 and 2015. Questions that I have are: how and where do I include sources to a person for editors of a Wikipedia article? What is the breakdown of the countries involved and to what extend is the information in existing articles available in Wikidata. Thanks, GerardM (talk) 07:55, 20 March 2017 (UTC)

This is great Gerard. They can use this as a task list for WiR editathons as well as the ongoing annual project! -- Erika aka BrillLyle (talk) 05:00, 21 March 2017 (UTC)

copy/paste whole statements ?

Is there any script or gadget available to copy & paste (or cut & paste) whole statements from one item to another? (including all the qualifiers, references, etc).

There have been a few times recently when I have found a statement on the wrong item of two items with a similar label, and this would be really useful. Jheald (talk) 10:01, 21 March 2017 (UTC)

QuickStatements

http://tools.wmflabs.org/wikidata-todo/quick_statements.php

I have a list with items and their area P2046.

1) How can I also add the unit? Q712226

2) It is not adding decimals.

Xaris333 (talk) 14:22, 21 March 2017 (UTC)

I believe it did not work in the original quickstatements (which you link to) but Magnus is working on a QuickStatements 2 here that may support this - if it doesn't work there please contact him! ArthurPSmith (talk) 17:41, 21 March 2017 (UTC)

Label capitalization

Hello,

I am a semi-active Wikidata editor and I usually find that, at least in Catalan, there are a lot of labels which are a common name that shouldn't be capitalized (according to Help:Label#Capitalization. I changed a lot of them but of course going one by one by hand isn't going to make a dent in the overall set of elements. So my questions are:

  1. Is there any script which allows to make automatic changes do de-capitalize labels which have certain characteristics? I know I could program some kind of bot, but if it's possible I'd like to avoid it.
  2. Is there any experience with this? I searched a little and the issue has come up in the past but I haven't found a solution nor a convincing answer.

Thank you in advance.--Arnaugir (talk) 15:25, 21 March 2017 (UTC)

almost every item with a subclass of (P279) statement or that is the value of a instance of (P31) on another item is a generic concept in some form and should not be capitalized in English and other languages with that rule (unless its name involves some other specific proper noun). Tools like QuickStatements (Q20084080) can make it relatively simple to change a large number of labels quickly. ArthurPSmith (talk) 17:45, 21 March 2017 (UTC)

Validation failed: Negative pattern matched: /^\s|[\v\t]|\s$/

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T161263

Something weird happens when I am trying to change label and description (see error in the title). Please try to set ru-label for Q11079271 "хеширование". --Infovarius (talk) 20:00, 23 March 2017 (UTC)

Strange, don't work with lower case, but work with upper case... --ValterVB (talk) 20:27, 23 March 2017 (UTC)
Sorry. A bug slipped through here. We've created a patch and it is waiting for deployment later today or early next week. --Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) (talk) 12:23, 24 March 2017 (UTC)
Same thing here, I still cannnot post "者" into label/description while this few houers.Pleas try "数学者" or "利用者". --Suisui (talk) 13:50, 24 March 2017 (UTC)
This section was archived on a request by: Matěj Suchánek (talk) 13:27, 27 March 2017 (UTC)

Cannot add an alias

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T161263

I am trying to add a Ukrainian alias to Wenkheim (Q830544). I want to add Венк фон Венкхейм, which is an alternative spelling to the article name Венк фон Венкгейм. However, I am getting a strange error: Could not save due to an error. Malformed input: Венк фон Венкхейм. I don't understand what does it stand for. Does anyone know where can this come from? — NickK (talk) 21:39, 23 March 2017 (UTC)

Crazily, the problem seems to be with the lowercase Cyrillic letter х (Х (Q179860)). Does anyone know why this can happen? — NickK (talk) 21:45, 23 March 2017 (UTC)
As there is no answer here and I could not identify any turnaround,I filed it as a bug: phab:T161263 — NickK (talk) 22:28, 23 March 2017 (UTC)
I am also getting the same error with labels, descriptions, and aliases using the Bengali letter অ (try adding it to the start of twenty-eighth (Q28469738)'s Bengali label). Mahir256 (talk) 01:22, 24 March 2017 (UTC)

A fix is in progress and should be deployed here later today or early next week. Sorry for the issue. --Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) (talk) 12:25, 24 March 2017 (UTC)

I guess it should be deployed ASAP? reported on Korean VP too. — Revi 12:26, 24 March 2017 (UTC)
Deployments on a Friday are highly discouraged and only allowed in very extreme exceptional cases. I will try to get this in as I said but I can't promise it. --Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) (talk) 12:28, 24 March 2017 (UTC)
FYI. Here are testcases on Douglas Adams (Q42). "더글러스 애덤스" OK. "더글러스 노엘 애덤스" failed. ( screenshot: File:Wikidata-error-더글러스-노엘-애덤스.png ) --Jmkim dot com (talk) 12:35, 24 March 2017 (UTC)
If "Unbreak now!" bug blocking non-latin text from being saved (Bengali, Korean, Ukrainian chars are all non-latin, so I'm guessing so. Correct me if wrong.) is not a "very extreme exceptional case", what would be considered "very extreme exceptional cases"? — Revi 12:41, 24 March 2017 (UTC)
"site does not load" or "we are leaking passwords" would be ;-) --Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) (talk) 12:43, 24 March 2017 (UTC)
Gadget-autoEdit.js: The tip was helpful! After removing all cyrillic letter languages and bengal, my own list is working again at least. --Harry Canyon (talk) 13:55, 26 March 2017 (UTC)
Where can I find my Gadget-autoEdit.js? User:Jmkim dot com/Gadget-autoEdit.js doesn't exist. :) --Jmkim dot com (talk) 18:00, 26 March 2017 (UTC)
I had the same problem too with Arabic Letters. Making every single user wants to deal with non-latin characters to deal with complicated java script code (from my point of view) is definitely not a solution. As far as I'm concerned, someone updated a code that has a bug, once this change is undone, everything will be OK. We had to be patient for one or two days - hopefully.--علاء الدين (talk) 22:57, 26 March 2017 (UTC)
The fix is deployed now. Sorry agqain for the issue. --Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) (talk) 09:48, 27 March 2017 (UTC)
This section was archived on a request by: Matěj Suchánek (talk) 13:27, 27 March 2017 (UTC)

Error while trying to set description

I've added a russian label for item Q2548040, but when I try to set description to value 'химическое соединение' (without quotes, means chemical compound), I've receive error message: "Could not save due to an error. Malformed input: химическое соединение". Same error at item Q413421, but some days ago I successfully set such description for item Q28976361. Def2010 (talk) 19:22, 25 March 2017 (UTC)

#Cannot add an alias Matěj Suchánek (talk) 19:38, 25 March 2017 (UTC)
This section was archived on a request by: Matěj Suchánek (talk) 13:27, 27 March 2017 (UTC)

Help request

There was once: 'iron (native)' 'instance of' 'mineral'
User:Infovarius prefers:
  • Qualifier: 'as' 'mineral'
User:Chris.urs-o prefers:
  • 'Iron (native)' 'instance of' 'native metal'
  • 'Iron (native)' 'instance of' 'iron (element)'.
  • Qualifier: 'as' 'mineral'
There is another possibility:
  • 'Iron (native)' 'instance of' 'native metal'
  • 'Iron (native)' 'instance of' 'mineral'.
  • Qualifier: 'as' 'iron (element)'
Any suggestions? Regards --Chris.urs-o (talk) 09:12, 20 March 2017 (UTC)
Why not have it as a qualifier? Thanks, GerardM (talk) 09:43, 20 March 2017 (UTC)
We're trying to deprecate P794 (P794) because it's too vague and untranslatable beyond European languages. I would prefer telluric iron (Q2248028) subclass of (P279) → native metal (Q310948). Deryck Chan (talk) 13:56, 20 March 2017 (UTC)
Ohh. I assume that we need a qualifier. --Chris.urs-o (talk) 16:00, 20 March 2017 (UTC)
@Deryck Chan: Could you name it 'qualifier, strict sense' instead of 'as' and not to deprecate it, please. --Chris.urs-o (talk) 05:45, 22 March 2017 (UTC)
@Chris.urs-o: See Wikidata:PFD#As (P794). Deryck Chan (talk) 14:33, 22 March 2017 (UTC)

Free the Open Library identifiers from Freebase

Hoi, I would like for us to approve all the Open Library identifiers for authors that are part of the Freebase data we have. It will enable us to link more humans to both VIAF and OL. Thanks, GerardM (talk) 11:15, 21 March 2017 (UTC)

@GerardM: What do you mean by "approve"? Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 12:53, 21 March 2017 (UTC)
What I mean is approve them and make them available in Wikidata. They are now in Freebase purgatory. Thanks, GerardM (talk) 12:55, 21 March 2017 (UTC)
@GerardM: there are no pending property proposals listed at Wikidata:Property proposal/Overview that refer to either "Freebase" or "Open Library", as far as I can see. Can you point to at least an example of what you're talking about here? ArthurPSmith (talk) 17:38, 21 March 2017 (UTC)
I think he might be referring to statements in the Primary Sources tool.
--- Jura 18:17, 21 March 2017 (UTC)
yes I do. Thanks, GerardM (talk) 05:29, 22 March 2017 (UTC)

VIAF identifiers as well?

It would be great if we could have the VIAF identifiers as well. Do we know how many of them are only in the Freebase collection ? Thanks, GerardM (talk) 21:52, 22 March 2017 (UTC)

Slave

How do you register that someone was a slave.. Who was the "owner"? Phyllis Wheatley is one example. She is on a category with American slaves. Thanks, GerardM (talk) 10:21, 22 March 2017 (UTC)

In the discussion for the creation of social classification (P3716) this use-case was spoken about. ChristianKl (talk) 16:46, 22 March 2017 (UTC)
Thanks, I have added many USA slaves. GerardM (talk) 03:43, 23 March 2017 (UTC)

Nicolás Antonio de Arredondo

Q5929942: Wrong year of birth. Please change to 1726. If you need proof see source on English Wikipedia. –84.41.34.154 16:33, 22 March 2017 (UTC)

1726 is the correct year but the wrong data. There is a reference to a more exact date. Fix English Wikipedia. Thanks, GerardM (talk) 03:45, 23 March 2017 (UTC)
I just added the full date today. It's sourced to a thesis, so I'm not certain that's a reliable source in EN wikipedia. We should be able to track down better source. - PKM (talk) 04:08, 23 March 2017 (UTC)

Outlier points in administrative territorial entities

This query may be of interest: tinyurl.com/k8g3fhx

It finds the furthest-from-average place for each one of a set of administrative units (eg, in the link above, for places in each civil parish (Q1115575) in North West England (Q47967)), and lists the worst case for each unit, in descending order by distance.

I am finding it quite useful to identify where a number of places have been included in the wrong one of two districts with similar names, which tend to come at the very top of the list; and also, further down the list, some places that have slightly incorrect coordinates. One day it may be possible to do more automated boundary checking; but I am finding this useful to identify the worst errors.

The set of administrative entities being looked at can be changed by changing the requirement ?cp wdt:P31 wd:Q1115575 . ?cp wdt:P131+ wd:Q47967 in lines 4 and 5 of the query, to any other set of administrative units.

To investigate the outliers further, it is useful to plot all the points in the unit with a query like tinyurl.com/mfgg2kk, putting the item number for the relevant administrative unit in line 3.

I wasn't able to get the query to run to look at all the civil parishes in the UK at once (any further optimisations very welcome); but it seems to be going quite happily looking region by region, and may be worth trying for other parts of the world too. Jheald (talk) 20:34, 22 March 2017 (UTC)

Help needed with donating images

L.S.,

The heritage institution I am working for is currently considering donating ca 1300 images (digitized glass-negatives) to wikimedia/wikidata under a CC-BY-4.0 licence. I'd like to get into contact with someone from the community who can guide me through this process. We are based in The Hague, The Netherlands.

Many thanks in advance. DirkJanse (talk) 08:03, 22 March 2017 (UTC)

Hoi, you can contact me.. I am based in Almere. Thanks, GerardM (talk) 08:20, 22 March 2017 (UTC)
FYI I have had contacts. Know the basic requirements and linked to the Dutch chapter as there is a potential for a lot of great cooperation. Thanks, GerardM (talk) 13:59, 22 March 2017 (UTC)
DirkJanse: Please write to info-commons@wikimedia.org with a subject line such as "Wikimedia Commons collection donation". See https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Partnerships Thanks! Syced (talk) 08:23, 23 March 2017 (UTC)

Constraints on Follows/Followed by

Looking at followed by (P156) and follows (P155), it seems there has been considerable discussion about whether these properties can be used as statements or must be qualifiers to some sort of series statement. It appears constraints to allow these properties only on qualifiers were added in 2015. One of the Wikidata property examples for <followed by> is "March (Q110) <followed by> April (Q118)". These are not qualifiers, but statements. If there's going to be a constraint then at least the example properties should be consistent with that. - PKM (talk) 19:53, 22 March 2017 (UTC)

don't know about this particular case, but in general Wikidata property examples don't actually work for properties that are used as qualifiers (or in references). I'm not sure how it could even be fixed... ArthurPSmith (talk) 20:12, 22 March 2017 (UTC)
If the constraint to qualifiers is valid, the fix would be to make an item for a series called "months of the year" and then say March <series> months of the year <follows February, <followed by> April. Personally, I'd rather have the constraint removed. But if there is consensus that the constraint is valid, then the property examples should all be items that use the property within the rules of the constraint. - PKM (talk) 21:46, 23 March 2017 (UTC)

Icon set for Wikidata classes

Hi all,

I created an icon set covering high-level Wikidata classes such as hospital/park/prison/school/etc.

The goal is to have a stylistically coherent collection of icons for use in Wikidata-powered applications. I will use it in my app that shows a map of nearby Wikidata items.

While many items have an image, images can not be used because most are unintelligible when reduced to the size of a map pin. The icons could also be used by Reasonator-like data explorers when an item image is not available. Example: If HospitalA has no image, showing a picture of HospitalB would be misleading, but showing an icon representing a generic hospital could be a way to make the data more visual.

New icons very welcome as long as their style is coherent with the others. And if you know an existing project that already does exactly this (stylistically coherent icon set linked to Wikidata) please let me know! Thanks a lot :-) Syced (talk) 08:47, 23 March 2017 (UTC)

In addition to the image property we have icon (P2910). ChristianKl (talk) 13:27, 23 March 2017 (UTC)
ChristianKl: These icons do not have a coherent style, unfortunately. Also, the examples for this property are items for which an icon is well-established, for instance a wheelchair... so I guess I will get reverted if I design an icon for "animal" and add it, right? If not, I will start adding icons for many items, but I am sure that would cause a major controversy, in particular because the icons are original designs with zero reference. Thanks! Syced (talk) 13:51, 23 March 2017 (UTC)
The domain for icon (P2910) doesn't suggest that it shouldn't be used for a concept like animals, so I don't see why someone would revert. A coherent style does happen to be a concern. Maybe there's a way to signal the style of the icon via a qualifier? ChristianKl (talk) 13:59, 23 March 2017 (UTC)
or a reference - perhaps Syced should create a Wikidata Item to anchor this icon project and use it as source for the icons added here? Or perhaps this should be its own property, if this is to be a formal wikiproject of some sort? It seems to me it's a nice idea at least. ArthurPSmith (talk) 14:04, 23 March 2017 (UTC)
Yes, it might make sense to simply have an item for the project on the Github page and then use stated in (P248). ChristianKl (talk) 16:56, 23 March 2017 (UTC)
I saw your question and examples ("I re-used the excellent Open-SVG-Map-Icons icon set and so far matched about 5% of the icons to Wikidata classes"), great. I think the icon set could have its own property: "wikidata class icon" (not just "any" icon, P2910). Oh, and please upload this free icon set to Wikimedia Commons! Another huge icon set is by Nicolas Mollet: c:Category:Map icons by Nicolas Mollet (but: cc-by-sa!), have a look! --Atlasowa (talk) 19:45, 23 March 2017 (UTC)

BTW, Syced: Is your "app that shows a map of nearby Wikidata items" related to geopedia.de or wikijourney.eu? --Atlasowa (talk) 20:04, 23 March 2017 (UTC)

Huh. So, a year or so ago I was trying to extend the WikidataInfo script to allow users to view bits of data and add simple statements from Wikipedia, using little popout bubbles filled with clear icons. For example, for books there would be a little popout menu filled with just icons for various genres (a UFO for scifi, dragon for fantasy, etc), and clicking on one would add the appropriate statement to the Wikidata items. Unfortunately, I was only able to find a few pictures in different styles, and while I was able to use unicode symbols for some things ('👤', '📖', '🎮', '📰' for P31, '♂', '♀', etc for P21), that didn't help much.
I don't suppose you're planning to expand this to non-geographic classes? This could be really useful for a lot of things. (Also, you may want to add the icons to Commons, if they're not there already.) --Yair rand (talk) 23:10, 23 March 2017 (UTC)
I uploaded two of the icons to Commons and added them as icon (P2910) yesterday, and apparently they have not been reverted yet. In order to get a better idea I wrote a query that shows icons used for 100 random items. As you can see, there is a bit of everything, but black-on-white with roundy shapes and no gradient seems to be the most common type. Syced (talk) 04:56, 24 March 2017 (UTC)

Acting

When someone holds an office as acting, how do we code that.

Example: The current Chief of Defence (Denmark) Bjørn Ingemann Bisserup earlier held the office twice as acting. I tried to encode it in position (P39) under the qualifier subject of the statement (P805) ... but this should better point to a more detailed article ... better suggestions?

Poul G (talk) 08:57, 23 March 2017 (UTC)

Golden Hind (Q546198) / Golden Hinde (Q20870362)

Could somebody take a look at Golden Hind (Q546198) and Golden Hinde (Q20870362) for me ?

Golden Hind (Q546198) originally tripped my attention because it has coordinates for one replica ship (in Devon), but a located in the administrative territorial entity (P131) for another (in London). But should it have either, if the original ship was broken up in the late 1600s ?

On the other hand, no wikis other than en-wiki (and Commons) have a separate article for the replicas, and even en-wiki only has one, for the replica in London. All other wikis treat everything in the one article. (Though fr-wiki and de-wiki do have redlinks on a disambiguation page: Golden Hind (Q3110070)) And, also, how should one indicate the relationship between the items? I added based on (P144) on Golden Hinde (Q20870362) for the replica in London, but I'm not sure that's right; and should there be something on the original ("inspired"? "copied as"?), to indicate a later version was made? (Something that could also be relevant for artworks).

Grateful for any thoughts or advice. Jheald (talk) 20:45, 23 March 2017 (UTC)

For Plimoth Jacket (Q28916697), a recreation of a 1620s-style embroidered woman's jacket, which is based on two historical items (one for the cut and shape, and one for the embroidery pattern), I used Plimoth Jacket (Q28916697) <inspired by> Layton jacket (Q6759619) <applies to part> cut (Q11626671). I couldn't find an appropriate property for "inspiration for" or similar on the original jacket's item, though I would like such a property. - PKM (talk) 21:15, 23 March 2017 (UTC)
For the Golden Hinde in particular, you might look at Vera Cruz (Q9696493) and Götheborg (Q2702575), which are both <instance of> ship replica (Q3456301) (which is a <subclass of> both museum ship (Q575727) and replica (Q1232589)). [And of no relevance whatsoever, I toured the Golden Hinde when it was in California many many years ago.]- PKM (talk) 22:10, 23 March 2017 (UTC)
And further, you might qualify ship replica (Q3456301) <of> Golden Hind (Q546198) in addition to your <based on> property. - PKM (talk) 22:16, 23 March 2017 (UTC)
ship replica (Q3456301) is a great find, thank you very much -- exactly what was needed.
Regarding the properties on Golden Hind (Q546198), which are a mixture of data about the replicas and the original (in line with the articles on most wikis), any thoughts on the best way forward? Jheald (talk) 22:32, 23 March 2017 (UTC)
I would split up the statements, statements about the original on Golden Hind (Q546198), statements about the replica on the replica. The Queen really did have the original Golden Hind established near Deptford as a memorial (?the first "ship museum" may be a stretch), according to Stow, you can cite here, p. 41 of the PDF, 23 of the book, so I'd change "ship museum" to "memorial" with a location at Deptford and start date 1581. Not clear when it was broken up, but we ought to be able to dig up a "not later than" date. - PKM (talk) 00:35, 24 March 2017 (UTC)

Entity/property usage calculator

Hey guys, I've just added a new tool to quickly calculate and report back links count of a page/entity/property/template, called "linkscount" on gadgets preference, analogous to "Transclusion count" link on English Wikipedia but much easier and faster to use. I often found myself in a situation to want to know exact number of property usage on Wikidata or how much a template is used, on other wikis; this tool facilitates this by providing a link, "(count)", on Special:WhatsLinksHere, for example see this Special:WhatLinksHere/Property:P961 or Special:WhatLinksHere/Template:Navbox when you've enabled the tool through the gadgets preference. I hope you find it useful. Cheers −ebrahimtalk 09:17, 24 March 2017 (UTC)

NLC (P1213) has some strange ID/URL mechanisms

Property:P1213 currently documents a pretty simplistic mechanism for generating the URL, which is wrong considering that w:zh:Module:Authority control uses another external parameter NLC_URL for the acc_sequence parameter. (For example, this author has a sequence of 000221367 and an identifier of 000080574. Putting his sequence into the FIND-ACC function yields a list of his books. I am not sure if there a thing like FIND-IDENTIFIER.) Should Wikidata create a new property for storing the acc_sequence that builds the actual URL? Or should Wikidata actually shift to this NLC_URL parameter as it is actually how you find other identifiers? (I don't think I am ever going to find out how one get any one of these things in the first place.)

Pinging User:Dabao qian (zhwp). --Artoria2e5 (talk) 14:03, 24 March 2017 (UTC)

Items as captions

The problem with media legend (P2096) is that there is not automation; you actually have to enter a caption in every language. Compare this to the two images used on Alces alces (Q35517), which use sex or gender (P21) to specify the sex of the animal in the picture. Is there something similar that can be used on Salmo (Q310436) to specify that the (current) image shows Atlantic salmon (Q188879)? Could instance of (P31) be used?

Another idea is to have a property like "Primary focus of media" and "secondary focus of media", which could e.g. be used to describe a Great Tit (Q25485) (primary focus) sitting on a branch of Corylus avellana (Q124969) (secondary focus), which could then be used to generate (the somewhat imprecise) "Great Tit (Q25485) together with Corylus avellana (Q124969)" in e.g. infoboxes. --Njardarlogar (talk) 10:52, 22 March 2017 (UTC)

Can you use depicts (P180), which is a Wikidata property to describe media items (Q28464773)? - PKM (talk) 20:05, 22 March 2017 (UTC)
Not immediately clear to me if it is intended for photographs, and it seems to require an item (with work (Q386724) for instance of (P31)). A good candidate, though. --Njardarlogar (talk) 11:00, 23 March 2017 (UTC)
Isn't this what Structured data for Commons is going to handle? Matěj Suchánek (talk) 13:38, 23 March 2017 (UTC)
Maybe, I'll have to to look into it (links for future reference: Wikidata:WikiProject Commons and c:Commons:Structured data). --Njardarlogar (talk) 09:37, 25 March 2017 (UTC)
Ah, yes, looking at what seems to be a test deployment, I see the property 'depicts' exists and is used for photographs. Good. --Njardarlogar (talk) 09:46, 25 March 2017 (UTC)

geographical envelope/shell concept in Russian geography

Can someone who speaks Russian/Ukranian/etc confirm what geographic envelope (Q2627400) is in English? If I understand this correctly, this is called in English "geographic envelope"/"geographical envelope"/"geographical shell"/"geographic shell", it is a concept which is influential in (ex-)Soviet/Russian geographical science but is not used so much in geography in other parts of the world. Is that right? (I was going to edit the item but was worried I am more guessing than knowing what I am doing.) If that is right, what should P31/P279 be on this item? SJK (talk) 09:40, 24 March 2017 (UTC)

I don't know English equivalent for this but I'll try to explain. It is a main (and only?) scope of geographical studies (physical geography, mainly). It is some layer +-10 km from Earth surface. It consists of crust, hydrosphere, biosphere, inner atmosphere (tropo- and may be strato-) and anthroposphere. I don't know which P31/P279 is suitable. Infovarius (talk) 12:25, 24 March 2017 (UTC)
Maybe it helps to list those things it contains with "has part"? JonathanKy (talk) 15:39, 26 March 2017 (UTC)

How to describe lanes of roads?

When describing roads here on Wikidata, is there a way to describe how many lanes it has and the surface material it is made of? //Mippzon (talk) 11:32, 26 March 2017 (UTC)

Alexis900 (talk • contribs • logs) Asqueladd (talk • contribs • logs) BeneBot* (talk • contribs • logs) Detcin (talk • contribs • logs) Dough4872 (talk • contribs • logs) Gz260 (talk • contribs • logs) Happy5214 (talk • contribs • logs) Imzadi1979 (talk • contribs • logs) Jakec (talk • contribs • logs) Labant (talk • contribs • logs) Liuxinyu970226 (talk • contribs • logs) Ljthefro (talk • contribs • logs) mxn (talk • contribs • logs) naveenpf (talk • contribs • logs) Puclik1 (talk • contribs • logs) Rschen7754 (talk • contribs • logs) Scott5114 (talk • contribs • logs) SounderBruce (talk • contribs • logs) TCN7JM (talk • contribs • logs) TimChen (talk • contribs • logs) Bodhisattwa (talk • contribs • logs) Daniel Mietchen (talk • contribs • logs) Tris T7 TT me Izolight (talk • contribs • logs) Gnoeee (talk • contribs • logs)
  Notified participants of WikiProject Roads Might be has part(s) (P527)lane (Q3222002) + qualifier quantity (P1114)XXX. --Liuxinyu970226 (talk) 12:26, 26 March 2017 (UTC)
I would recommend against adding lanes, as they can vary widely on longer roads (e.g. cross-country Interstate highways that range from 2 lanes per direction in the countryside to 5+ lanes per direction in urban centers). SounderBruce (talk) 18:17, 26 March 2017 (UTC)
@SounderBruce: Can't we use extra qualifiers like maximum value (P2312)a number + minimum value (P2313)a number? Or define terminus (P559)two random "node" cities/highways/houses? --Liuxinyu970226 (talk) 12:24, 27 March 2017 (UTC)

Errors occuring with non-latin alphabets (malformed input)

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T161263
Resolved

Hello there,

As some of you noticed, these last days we struggled with a bug regarding editing labels and descriptions in alphabets such as Cyrillic or Arabic.

After several updates, this should be fixed now. Please let me know if you encounter this problem again.

Sorry for this inconvenience, Lea Lacroix (WMDE) (talk) 13:00, 27 March 2017 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #253

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

This is the Wikidata summary of the week before 2017-03-27.

  • Development
    • Fixing a bug that prevented users to edit descriptions in some non-latin alphabets (phab:T161263)
    • Worked on Special:NewLexeme which will be used to create new Lexemes for supporting lexicographical data (phabricator:T157973)
    • Aligned some more colors with Wikimedia color palete (phabricator:T151194)
    • Added more autocompletion for the Wikidata Query Service (phabricator:T150950)
    • Started working on support for Forms of words in the UI for supporting lexicographical data (phabricator:T160520)

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here.


Pay website to make use of Wikidata ?

There is a grant proposal at meta:Grants:Project/EveryPolitician. It asks to provide WMF funds to develop software that would make use of Wikidata (look for the "Funder" column in the budget section). Oddly in a field where our coverage is actually already quite good. Not sure what to think of it.
--- Jura 14:14, 19 March 2017 (UTC)

The source from EveryPolitician's scrapers is available and there are instructions for writing your own code to contribute. It isn't proprietary and they are looking to contribute to WikiData, not just take money for learning to fetch data from WikiData. I agree that this should have been more clear. --MarkAHershberger (talk) 22:07, 22 April 2017 (UTC)
It happens all too often that I add data in Wikidata for yet another parliament that we do not cover. We certainly are not complete for most of them and some we do not even know. No, our coverage is pathetic and yes, combining the power of data has its place. Thanks, GerardM (talk) 18:29, 19 March 2017 (UTC)
@Jura1: we clearly haven't expressed this part of the proposal very well. This part isn't about us using Wikidata (in terms of pulling data from here) — it's about things like reworking the hundreds of scrapers we have that check every Parliament site across the world looking for updates every day, and instead of simply feeding that information directly into EveryPolitician, feeding it into Wikidata instead. The proposal used to say exactly that, but I edited it to try to show that this will be about much more than just rewriting scrapers, as that's just one part of what we'll be doing. Clearly I made things worse rather than better, so I've tried to broaden that out again.
I agree with GerardM that the coverage in Wikidata at the moment is generally fairly bad, outside a handful of countries where people have put a lot of effort in. Try ordering the table at Wikidata:EveryPolitician#By_country by number of members to see even how little this data is even filled in at all, and of course for lots of those there aren't even start/end dates, never mind things like constituencies or party/faction affiliations.) When you expand that out to things like Cabinet-level memberships things get even worse (and a huge proportion of that data that is filled in was imported from Infoboxes where the links were to Ministry pages rather than Minister pages, creating a lot of quite broken data).
By my reckoning not much more than about 50% of the current national-level parliamentarians in the world even have Wikidata entries at all (and that reduces quickly as you start to look at historic data in most countries), and the modelling of quite core concepts (like what the national parliament of each country even is) is incredibly inconsistent at the minute, making lots of the queries that serious users of this data would want to make effectively impossible, especially if doing multi-country analysis. There's a lot of work here to be done, and rather than us putting all our effort into building EveryPolitician entirely independently from Wikidata, our proposal is that we channel that work into making sure that Wikidata's coverage in this area really is not only "quite good", but the best source of open political data available. Clearly this isn't something we'd be doing in isolation — and for this to work well, we'll need to work very closely with everyone who is currently contributing in this area. So we'd love to hear more about what you think about the proposal — and particularly where you think we're going to hit the biggest challenges. Some of those are fairly obvious (e.g. that there will be countries where there simply aren't enough, or even any, Wikidata contributors who'll keep the data updated), but doubtless there will be many other issues too. --Oravrattas (talk) 07:20, 21 March 2017 (UTC)
  • Well, Wikidata is a work in progress. I doubt there are many fields where we reached completion. The question is if this topic is more or less advanced compared to others. I think we will soon have reached a good coverage for Finland: apparently something that can be grown through a project on Wikidata itself.
    It's obviously a good thing if websites make use of our data and develop tools that can help us improve our data. Toolserver is a resource that is made for this.
    Still, should WMF finance development of websites just to enable them to make use of Wikidata data? There is already a development backlog at Wikidata itself, so it don't quite see why one would finance development elsewhere when this should be furthered here. If import and list generation was improved at Wikidata, many other topics would benefit from this as well.
    --- Jura 18:14, 21 March 2017 (UTC)
Sure, there are definitely countries where Wikidata already has good coverage, and those should definitely be used as models for how to achieve that everywhere. I'm not so sure that Finland is one of those though. It's just outside the top 10 countries with most members marked in Wikidata with a relevant position held (P39) statement (in this case member of the Parliament of Finland (Q17592486)), with over 2300 people. However, only 162 of those include dates of the membership — most are simply a bare "was a member" — and only 43 of those are listed as a current member (of the 200 there should be). And only 120 of those 2300 memberships include a electoral district (P768) qualifier — and 10 of those constituencies have a instance of (P31) of something other than electoral district of Finland (Q28657263).
If we run a query to list the current holder of positions that are part of the Finnish Government (Q2366737), we get 8 positions — which out of 15 is a much better ratio than the majority of countries, but, comparing it to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sipilä_Cabinet shows that 3 out of those 8 are actually out of date, and have since been replaced (in some cases more than once since the data was accurate).
Presumably much of this information will be organically cleaned up over time. But we've been working for the last two years on gathering all this sort of information for over 200 countries and territories and working out how to keep that up to date. For quite some time we've been pulling information from Wikidata into EveryPolitician to augment the data we get from other sources. But we now believe that putting our efforts into getting much more of that information into Wikidata, and creating better tools for keeping it up to date here, will be a much better approach than us essentially "competing" on building parallel datasets. As a charity, mySociety's purpose is to create and popularise these sorts of datasets and tools. We believe that bringing the work we've done to date on EveryPolitician into Wikidata is the best way to do that, and that together we can greatly increase the amount of well-structured, freely available and usable political data available to parliamentary monitoring groups, campaigners, researchers, and other groups or individuals who require exactly this sort of information.
--Oravrattas (talk) 20:12, 21 March 2017 (UTC)
  • "the modelling of quite core concepts (like what the national parliament of each country even is) is incredibly inconsistent at the minute" - Absolutely, i second that. I care about parliament articles on german Wikipedia and they are horrible. Quite often substandard content to begin with, no infoboxes, no references and outdated for serveral election cycles. And i see those same problems in all languages Wikipedias, for hundreds of national parliaments, and their elections! If Wikidata were as curated as PARLINE by the Interparliamentary Union, we would be much better off.
  • "But we've been working for the last two years on gathering all this sort of information for over 200 countries and territories and working out how to keep that up to date." - that it is exactly the kind of thing that wikidata needs to learn to do, keep data up to date! This is a great learning opportunity, with lessons that can be applied to other knowledge areas in wikidata. --Atlasowa (talk) 21:04, 23 March 2017 (UTC)
    • Outsourcing the task isn't a way Wikidata learns how to do this. Investing resources in having a general tool for data import like described in the community wishlist might be more likely to get Wikidata to generally learn how to do this. ChristianKl (talk) 11:00, 27 March 2017 (UTC)
      • It is somewhat strange that the funding should be used to develop proprietary software tools for a website that uses Wikidata's data, tools that other fields at Wikidata lack.
        --- Jura 06:01, 28 March 2017 (UTC)

How to get a single JSON line for a wd item

I think I've done this before, but can't remember how. I'm using the Wikidata JSON dump, but I want to make a small example file with (e.g.) 3 specific items in JSON format, one item per line as in the JSON dump. How can I get hold of a JSON formatted line for an entry like https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q26972265? HYanWong (talk) 17:17, 27 March 2017 (UTC)

Try this API call. --Succu (talk) 18:08, 27 March 2017 (UTC)
Great! Thanks a lot. HYanWong (talk) 19:20, 27 March 2017 (UTC)

Contribute entity URI to Wikidata

This is in reference to an earlier query on contributing entity URI to Wikidata: Wikidata:Project chat/Archive/2017/03#Contribute entity URI to Wikidata

We have further queries below.

Based on our understanding, anyone can add/edit the data from Wikidata and these will be fed into the infobox of a corresponding Wikipedia article. Similarly, anyone can add/edit the data from an article in Wikipedia. Does this mean that the data in Wikidata will be overwritten if someone add/edit the data in the corresponding Wikipedia article? Or is it a case where data is fed only from Wikidata to Wikipedia, but never in the reverse direction?

Thanks.

P.S. Notice you have shifted the previous discussion to archive. How do we continue with the current discussion thread?  – The preceding unsigned comment was added by Nlbkos (talk • contribs) at 09:30, 14 March 2017‎ (UTC).

@Nlbkos:Currently, there's no direct way to enter the data from Wikipedia into Wikidata. ChristianKl (talk) 09:09, 28 March 2017 (UTC)

Criminal organisations

Can anyone suggest what the difference between organized crime group (Q4335775) and criminal organization (Q1788992) actually is? It seems to me they are mostly the same thing, but the ruwiki sitelinks are different so can't be merged, also there is a has part(s) (P527) from Q1788992 to Q4335775. I don't read Russian, but from Google Translate I think the difference is that ru:Организованная преступная группа is about the concept of a specific individual criminal organisations but I think ru:Преступное сообщество is actually more about multiple distinct criminal organisations working together cooperatively, which seems to overlap with organized crime (Q46952) which has the ruwiki article ru:Организованная преступность. Maybe ru:Преступное сообщество needs to be merged into one of ru:Организованная преступная группа or ru:Организованная преступность, so that organized crime group (Q4335775) and criminal organization (Q1788992) can be merged? Or else, if this is some important distinction made in Russian discussions of this topic, can we sort out which item the other language sitelinks belong to, and what the English labels/descriptions should be for both? Also, the dewiki article on Q4335775 (de:Bildung krimineller Vereinigungen) seems to be more about specific crimes in the German and Austrian penal codes than the concept of a criminal group in itself, so maybe it would be better attached to another item? Maybe some new item which is a subclass of conspiracy to commit a crime (Q3627314)? SJK (talk) 08:30, 24 March 2017 (UTC)

Question about Russian articles should be discussed at Russian forum. Infovarius (talk) 12:34, 24 March 2017 (UTC)

Infovarius. I wasn't just talking about Russian articles, I was also asking about a dewiki article. Also, I don't speak Russian (or German), so I am not sure if I should be posting in English on the Russian or German forums. I think if someone came to this page and started posting in Russian or German, some people might not appreciate it. I really think the discussion should be moved back. SJK (talk) 21:38, 24 March 2017 (UTC)
I moved it back here for reasons I gave, although for now I leave it on Russian forum too. SJK (talk) 07:14, 28 March 2017 (UTC)

QuickStatements - limitations?

I tried to execute many commands of the following type: 

Q4115189	P2299	48041.7014141257U550207	P585	+2015-01-01T00:00:00Z/09	S248	"http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.CD"

or 

Q4115189	P2299	48041.7014141257U550207	P585	+2015-01-01T00:00:00Z/09

or 

Q4115189	P2299	48041.7014141257U550207	S248	"http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.CD"


This works insofar, as it creates an entry to the property P2299 with a more or less correct value and the right unit. But the rest simply isn't processed. My questions:

  • Is there any simply error I could correct to get a full entry?
  • Is there a limit to quickstaments, which makes it impossible to add sources or qualifiers to (for example) quantities? (To what else it doesn't work?)
  • How can I find the correct codes for the source (Sxxx)?
  • How can I prevent the creation of many more decimal places?

123 (talk) 01:02, 28 March 2017 (UTC)

For the first two questions I found the (sad) answer myself: It's indeed a limitation/bug: [11]. The last two questions remain open. And the first question I could change: Is there another way to add various claims at once, which doesn't have that limitation? Is there some accessible documentation? 123 (talk) 15:31, 28 March 2017 (UTC)
I found a fork working as expected: [12]. Wouldn't it be better to link to that fork on the wikidata help pages etc.? 123 (talk) 15:50, 28 March 2017 (UTC)
Check with the tool maintainer Magnus Manske. There is a completely new version of Quickstatements currently in testing I believe. ArthurPSmith (talk) 18:44, 28 March 2017 (UTC)

Item Quality Pilot Campaign

Hi everyone!

My name is Glorian. I am a student who is working on a thesis about applying machine learning to evaluate Wikidata item quality. I am aiming to develop a kind of ORES for evaluating item quality. Furthermore, it enables us to easily find low quality items and fix them. That way, I hope we can improve our data quality.

As the first step to develop the mentioned tool, I am going to launch a campaign for grading the quality of Wikidata items in the near future. Prior to launching such campaign, I decided to launch a pilot campaign for testing my sample.

Since you are the expert on item quality, I would like to ask you to help me grading item quality in the pilot campaign. Feel free to invite your peers to help grading the items in this pilot campaign. Also, It would be fantastic if you can give me feedback regarding to the campaign. To participate in the pilot campaign, you can go to this link, and click “Request Workset”. As for the hint in grading the items, you can refer to the criteria here.

Many thanks for your help! --Glorian WD (talk) 16:40, 21 March 2017 (UTC)

When those are the criteria, I hardly think your work is worth it. Thanks, GerardM (talk) 17:02, 21 March 2017 (UTC)
When we are to express quality in a meaningful way, compare the number of incoming and outgoing links of an article with the incoming and outgoing links of an item. When there are no obvious surprises as homonyms in error. We know we are reasonable. When there are issues we have at least a tool that informs about the quality of either a Wikipedia article or a Wikidata item. Quality does not exist in isolation and it should be actionable. Thanks, GerardM (talk) 17:32, 21 March 2017 (UTC)
Our quality prediction models are built on "actionable metrics". This is a term we have been using for a long time, so it is something we're sensitive to. See Warncke-Wang et al.'s Tell me more: an actionable quality model for Wikipedia. for the research that our modeling strategy is based on. I'm not sure what your problem is. --EpochFail (talk) 19:15, 21 March 2017 (UTC)
Exactly, wrong project. This is Wikidata where things are different. Thanks, GerardM (talk) 05:34, 22 March 2017 (UTC)
Thanks. I'm familiar with the distinction. --EpochFail (talk) 18:28, 22 March 2017 (UTC)
@Glorian WD: Please see meta:Research:Index. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 17:13, 21 March 2017 (UTC)
Hi Andy, I'm working with Glorian on this stuff. I'm not sure why you're directing Glorian to m:R:I, but FWIW, this is hardly a research project at all and much more an attempt to put together basic tooling for Wikidata. Our article quality models for English, Russian, and French Wikipedia have been very popular, so we're trying to get similar functionality implemented for Wikidata. --EpochFail (talk) 19:15, 21 March 2017 (UTC)
Because of "...a student who is working on a thesis about applying machine learning to evaluate...". Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 07:48, 22 March 2017 (UTC)
Gotcha. Makes sense. --EpochFail (talk) 15:46, 22 March 2017 (UTC)
Maybe you'd want to test it first within the WMDE/WMF staff member-linked usergroup who drafted the quality criteria? This way, you could do a new draft of the criteria and propose this to the community.
--- Jura 18:02, 21 March 2017 (UTC)
We've already done that before releasing this open pilot. --EpochFail (talk) 19:15, 21 March 2017 (UTC)
Yeah. I think we have done drafting the quality criteria. What we are going to learn from the feedback of this pilot campaign could be used to revise the existing quality criteria. --Glorian WD (talk) 16:41, 22 March 2017 (UTC)
If I'm right your „campaign“ is about judging the correctness of Wikipedia edits. Why should this be done by Wikidata users? --Succu (talk) 20:51, 21 March 2017 (UTC)
Succu: After authorizing there is a step where you have to choose Wikiata. I guess you chose the wrong one? I am using the tool right now to evaluate Wikidata items. Syced (talk) 07:14, 22 March 2017 (UTC)
Without changing anything I now get a set of items. --Succu (talk) 15:32, 22 March 2017 (UTC)
Great, please let us know when results are ready! I guess most items are either D or E. While evaluating I got a redirect item, do you also want to evaluate the quality of redirects? A redirect has no reason to be of bad quality I believe. Cheers! Syced (talk) 07:14, 22 March 2017 (UTC)
Thanks! Good catch with redirects. This is exactly the type of issue that we're looking out for in the pilot. We should remove those redirects from the dataset for the full labeling campaign (which will be ~5k items). --EpochFail (talk) 15:46, 22 March 2017 (UTC)
If you don't do it already, I suggest you extract some information about the image of each Wikidata item: size, contrast, sharpness, and give this information as input to your machine learning. This information can be extracted using ImageMagick (command-line) and OpenCV (library). Syced (talk) 08:44, 22 March 2017 (UTC)
Good idea. Glorian WD, I don't think we have a page put together for proposed feature engineering strategies. Could you create one at Wikidata:Item quality/Modeling or something like that? It'll be good to capture these ideas for when we get to start on feature engineering work. --EpochFail (talk) 15:46, 22 March 2017 (UTC)
Thanks for the suggestion Syced. I have created the page Wikidata:Item quality/Modeling and added your suggestion there! --Glorian WD (talk) 21:59, 22 March 2017 (UTC)
Again, this model is based on Wikipedia. Popularity on Wikipedia projects have no bearing on the relevance to Wikidata quality. The research is not about Wikidata so what is the basis for all this? Thanks, GerardM (talk) 08:00, 22 March 2017 (UTC)
it is not about the popularity. why don't you let the boffins develop some metrics so we can shove them in the face of the wikipedia know it alls. Slowking4 (talk) 14:55, 22 March 2017 (UTC)
In the last discussion I asked for a use-case of developing this feature and I don't think I got an answer from you. Can you tell us a user story of how you believe the feature you develop will be used for the benefit of Wikidata? ChristianKl (talk) 13:48, 22 March 2017 (UTC)
if i may - if the ORES can incorporate editor judgement of quality, it will allow you to make work groups by quality level focusing effort. and it will allow you to assess quality improvement over time. Slowking4 (talk) 15:18, 22 March 2017 (UTC)
Thanks Slowking4. ChristianKl we're working on a brief summary of the expected benefit when we announce the larger labeling campaign (this is just a pilot to work out the bugs. Here's the short list of some of the things we have been able to do with quality models in Wikipedias that should have corresponding interesting things in Wikidata too: measuring content coverage dynamics, helping students write articles, and helping WikiProjects prioritize re-assessments. Fuzheado has been using our article quality models in his classroom to help students know the impact of their contributions to Wikipedia. The Wiki Education Foundation is using the article quality models to recommend work to students (basically, trying to fill in quality gaps). These are just a few things that are useful with quality models in other wikis. I'm sure Wikidata will have unique use cases too, but this provides a bit of a sample. --EpochFail (talk) 15:55, 22 March 2017 (UTC)
I think it's worthy of criticism that you try to build a quality metric without first looking at the use cases. As I said in the previous discussion I don't think the fact that quality metrics are useful for Wikipedia matter here. The fact that you simply try to copy something from Wikipedia and not listen to feedback enough to bring up the same talking point again, pushes me into a direction that it's worthy to oppose your project.
Outcome metrics that are designed to let people reallocate their efforts to other tasks have the potential to create harm, so the concern isn't just that the project is useless.
I don't think that telling students that edit Wikidata that they should optimize for some quality metric is likely to be beneficial. It makes more sense for the student to add data that they believe is missing and where they think adding the data creates an improvement. That might mean that they create a lot of items with only 3 statements. On Wikipedia creating a lot of stubs is discouraged and when you try to force a system on Wikipedia that copies those Wikipedia norms, I think that's bad for our project. ChristianKl (talk) 16:22, 22 March 2017 (UTC)
ChristianKl, we did think of use-cases ahead of time. See my list above and Lydia's comments in this discussion. Also, I'm pretty sure that Lydia Pintscher was the person who first asked me and Glorian to take a look at this project, so I'm sure she had use-cases in mind. It seems you're not at all familiar with Fuzheado's work with the article quality metric and his students. Maybe you could familiarize yourself before raising such strong, negative predictions. The quality model will not capture "Wikipedia's norms" or whatever it is that you mean by that. --EpochFail (talk) 18:27, 22 March 2017 (UTC)

I am not impressed by my trial of a work set. Criteria are somewhat subjective and to my surprise I was asked to judge redirect pages. Lymantria (talk) 15:45, 22 March 2017 (UTC)

Lymantria thanks for pointing that out. It's certainly something we missed when filtering nonsense out of the dataset. Catching issues like this is exactly why we're running this small pilot. We'll make sure to have those filtered out for the larger full campaign. --EpochFail (talk) 15:57, 22 March 2017 (UTC)
Oh! One more thing. You're right that the criteria is subjective. That is by design. We decided to that we wanted to capture Wikidata editors' judgement about quality and that the criteria should only help you make judgements. In this case, we're going to compare ratings by different editors to find out where judgement does and does not show consistency. We'll likely need to iterate on the criteria a bit before we're ready for the the full labeling campaign to make sure that we make good use of the time we spend labeling. --EpochFail (talk) 16:00, 22 March 2017 (UTC)
Hi Lymantria! thanks for the feedback. We will make sure we eliminate the redirect pages in the real (full) campaign. Concerning to the subjective criteria, as EpochFail pointed out, we intentionally did it because we want to capture the editors' definition/judgment of item quality. Do you have any other feedback that you want to point out? --Glorian WD (talk) 16:32, 22 March 2017 (UTC)
Hi, Yes, I do have some other feedback concerning the subjectivity of the criteria. I understand that you are looking for judgements and that judgements do imply a portion of subjectivity.
First is concerning examples at Wikidata:Item quality. Comparing Coniophora arida (Q10646558) to Gustavus Simmons (Q381312) I think that the first is not a very good example for an E and perhaps deserves a better judgement than the second. Both have descriptions in four languages, but the first has more external sources (through identifiers). I would perhaps judge it with C rather than E - which I think is a relatively big difference. It's because of these examples that I find it hard to understand the intention of the classification A-E.
I wonder why class A requires a good image, while not in all subjects - think of more conceptual ones - can have one.
An open question of mine: Could an item with instance of (P31)Wikimedia disambiguation page (Q4167410) perhaps be judged D without more statements? What more statements would one expect? Should the description then perhaps have "statement(s)" in stead of the pure plural? Lymantria (talk) 07:31, 23 March 2017 (UTC)
Lymantria, looks like the examples that I put on Wikidata:Item quality are a bit outdated. So, it seems that the examples were added prior to the existing criteria. Based on the existing criteria, I agree that those two items should fall on higher class.
Regarding to the image on class "A", note that there is "if applicable" on that criterion. This means, there are items class "A" which are not applicable to have images.
I am considering to remove items with instance of (P31)Wikimedia disambiguation page (Q4167410) from the sample of the full-campaign. What do you think about this? --Glorian WD (talk) 15:06, 23 March 2017 (UTC)
Perhaps removing instance of (P31)Wikimedia disambiguation page (Q4167410) is a good idea, as well as instance of (P31)Wikimedia category (Q4167836), instance of (P31)Wikimedia template (Q11266439) and perhaps instance of (P31)Wikimedia list article (Q13406463). But perhaps these could normally be D class as well. Lymantria (talk) 15:28, 23 March 2017 (UTC)
Lymantria, thanks! I have added this to my note for improving the sample prior to launching the full campaign. Are you still participating on the pilot campaign? perhaps, you will find more bugs ;) --Glorian WD (talk) 16:39, 24 March 2017 (UTC)
The A to E criteria is subjective and created by you. If you are really interested in the opinions of Wikidata editors in which items are high quality it doesn't make sense to tell the Wikidata editors which criteria they are supposed to use. If you are sincerely interested in the opinion of Wikidata editors about what quality means you shouldn't prime with your own sense of what quality is supposed to mean.
We had an RFC about quality. It suggests that Accuracy, Objectivity, Reputation and Consistency are important for quality. I don't see those aspects in the proposed A to E criteria. I haven't seen any explicit reasoning why they aren't included. Telling people who you ask to judge quality to assess quality in a way that doesn't address them is problematic. ChristianKl (talk) 09:27, 24 March 2017 (UTC)
ChristianKl, the existing criteria that we have now is by far and large, built upon the Wikidata:Showcase_items, plus the discussion with the editors here. I think Showcase item criteria is the best that we have now for signifying item quality. I am aware with this RFC. I did contact the author of this RFC and he said that he has still to incorporate the community feedback to this quality framework. This means it might be wise for not basing my work on this RFC for now. Moreover, before I am starting this research, Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) even suggested to use the Showcase items criteria for this research. --Glorian WD (talk) 16:49, 24 March 2017 (UTC)
There has been no vote to adopt that document as policy. I don't like the process of making it a defacto policy without a vote by making it the basis of the quality assessment process. It would be easy at this point to simply let people rate items on a 10 point scale and see what Wikidata editors actually think constitutes quality. I don't see a good argument for why the editors should be told what they should consider to be quality when the goal is to get their opinions about the item quality (which is the spirit in which you started this thread). ChristianKl (talk) 17:30, 24 March 2017 (UTC)

A serious chat

Hey folks, we need to have a serious chat about the reception that Glorian WD received here. He's doing some important work because he believes it will help Wikidata. Almost all of the replies have been intensely negative. This really disappointed and I think that it's time to reflect on how we treat good-faith contributors -- students or otherwise. Feedback is great! Positive feedback expands a project and incorporates more perspectives. Negative feedback attempts to control and shut down ideas that people don't personally agree with; it assumes stupidity and bad-faith, and it will to make our community incredibly hard to approach for newcomers. Are we OK with going down the same road as the big Wikipedias by making newcomers not feel welcome? We should be better than this. We should strive to be welcoming, to see the value in each others' work, and to increase that value constructively. In the end, positive feedback is our best hope we have in actually achieving our goals. --EpochFail (talk) 20:31, 22 March 2017 (UTC)

When we are to have a chat, what do you want to talk about. When I read YOUR feedback, you do not address any of the feedback given. I desperately want better feedback and what I get is something that does not provide something I understand we will benefit from. I have given specific scenario's, use cases how Wikidata WILL improve quality both for Wikipedia and Wikidata. There is nothing from you. When you want a serious chat do not blame it on the other because your model of quality is rejected. If anything it is not the student who is given this task that is to blame. What is implemented is a flawed system that may iterate into something useful eventually. Not during his/her project.
When we talk about quality it is sources that are so important. But what sources and how do you concentrate on sources. A previous student did his/her thesis. Did not finish the functionality and we are left with nothing. When you stand for quality lets talk and lets talk seriously. But let us argue about quality and convince. I am on record on how we can improve quality and as far as I am concerned we have not talked. Thanks, GerardM (talk) 20:55, 22 March 2017 (UTC)
Thanks for illustrating my point. How do you know that the quality model will not be useful while Glorian is working on it? I believe in Glorian and in the value of his efforts. I think that the work he's already done will prove to be useful. Who is that past student you speak of and why are you faulting Glorian for this past students failure to do what you wanted them to do? --EpochFail (talk) 21:28, 22 March 2017 (UTC)
<grin> In that case we are both good illustrators. </grin> Obviously you have to stand by your man. You fail to address any of the points made. Disappointing. Thanks, GerardM (talk) 21:34, 22 March 2017 (UTC)
Shouldn't he speak for himself? I think your meddling ("we"), EpochFail, didn't help him. --Succu (talk) 21:50, 22 March 2017 (UTC)
Glorian is a newcomer. I'm decidedly not (been around for ~10 years), so I'm a bit more empowered to push back against this kind of behavior. --EpochFail (talk) 22:37, 22 March 2017 (UTC)
If it comes to WD, EpochFail, you are a newcomer too. So how your empowerment to push back against this kind of behavior helps Glorian to fight his way to the Wikimedia jungle? --Succu (talk) 22:53, 23 March 2017 (UTC)
Ok, so the talk is with you. You state that you feel empowered to "push back".. I would say you throw your weight around and you do not listen, you do not respond to the pushback for the proposal that is on the table. We are told to accept because "you and some others" have an opinion that something might be good. I tell you and I am longer with the Wikimedia Foundation and I have way more edits on Wikidata and I have published on my blog more about quality in Wikidata than you have. Both our weight, and I am overweight is immaterial when we keep it to arguments.
Quality in Wikipedia is NOT in single items, it is the relationship of items and in the relationship with sources. When a Wikipedia article (a source) states that there are 24 awardees for an award and Wikidata has 24 awardees, it is quality. When the numbers do not match, there is an issue. When someone is called an author and he does not have a VIAF identifier, an author did not publish or is not known in any of the worldwide libraries.. That is a quality issue.
I am not telling you anything new here but it is this kind of actionable quality that matters. When an awardee has little information except for a label and the fact that he is an awardee, the value of the item is high because he completes a set of data. The problem with your approach is that people will mistake your single item based approach and put it up for deletion. When they feel empowered enough by the "low quality" and, yes it is just a Muslim, they may even speedily delete.
With 25,380,559 items and counting there is no meaningful way to manage single items. My watchlist is too big. I have 168 items on it at the moment and there is no way I can check them all. When a bot adds labels it is easily 10 times that much. The descriptions for Wikidata items are useless and we have something better that could replace it but we do not even discuss it. I use Reasonator as a tool because it is accepted that the Wikidata edit screen sucks but ok we suck and we have not had the resources to do something about it.
When you want to engage the community and make a dent in quality consider what we have. It is a dataset. Address quality as a set theory problem and you get traction on many ends. When I am interested in "100 women (BBC)" let me subscribe on my watchlist and have all associated items trigger my watchlist. When I am interested in "Black Lunch Table" same thing. But once you start thinking about quality and engagement in this way, you will understand why the current approach lacks any sense of connection. It does not do so at all.
So the data can be split up in parts to get attention from people having an interest, the data itself can be tracked in this way as well. When DBpedia and Wikidata differ in opinion on a set of items, it is for both projects a quality issue. Have a subset with these differences and you are engaging communities in a meaningful way. When the {{authority control}} on English Wikipedia does not exist on authors, we do not inform readers about VIAF or Open Library. The first informs, the second provides access to authors and freely licensed books. That is operational quality, that is how you engage our community. You provide information that engages and makes for a positive difference.
So you can persist and tell us how important the work that you throw at us is. Or you can react to the criticism to the arguments. So far you are in violent opposition to comments from the community and you do not address any of the issues raised. More importantly you cannot even indicate how your approach will make a positive difference. In my opinion, it is at best a first step on a learning curve about Wikidata for you. It is a lesson many of us have learned already. Thanks, GerardM (talk) 03:40, 23 March 2017 (UTC)
Gerard, I thought I had explained everything to you yesterday and you had understood and agreed that the project can be benefitial. I am disapointed that I apparently failed completely. We'll conclude this discussion here and Glorian and I will sit down and work on a page explaining the project more. --Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) (talk) 08:47, 23 March 2017 (UTC)
I am happy with an experiment. I am happy with an initial approach to see where it gets us. I am happy for you and Christian to work on this. I do not accept it as a valid approach because the data representation is oversimplified. I said so at the time in our conversation. You asked me to wait and see because there is merit in being able to identify problems in items, and there is. When EpochFail throws his weight around, and insists that the approach is valid (a professional assessment), he has to appreciate that as a professional working on research, he will be challenged for the validity of what he says. It is not, he knows it.
Lydia you did not fail. Things happened. I am not happy about it and I doubt anyone is. Thanks, GerardM (talk) 06:42, 24 March 2017 (UTC)
The fact that you claim that the work he's doing is important doesn't mean that it's important. It also doesn't mean that the project is net positive. I'm willing to be convinced that it's net positive but till now I'm not seeing a reasonable effort being made. In the previous discussion I asked for use-cases. I don't think that was an unreasonable demand. Those haven't been provided and there's an attempt to get other people do do something to support the project, I approached this discussion more negatively.
I haven't seen you or Glorian acknowledging the possible harm created by having bad quality metrics. In particular I do have the concern that this project will encourage that a given amount of information is spread about over fewer items than would be desireable.
I do think that quality is important but I have the impression that this project seeks the keys under the lamppost. I for example believe that an item with high quality sources is better than an item with lower quality sources. Unfortunately we don't have direct data about source quality on Wikidata and as a result the model that Glorian wants to build is unlikely to pick it up. There's currently a grant proposal in that direction (https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Project/Finding_References_and_Sources_for_Wikidata) but that's a different project than Glorian's.
The model is also likely unable to say whether entries on Wikidata accurately reflect what a source says. That's important for quality but your algorithm won't be able to pick it up.
If someone runs a bot and adds 100,000 new statements to Wikidata someone might look at the tool that's supposed to be built here to decide whether or not the bot improves or lowers Wikidata quality. If the metric is bad that's potentially harmful. ChristianKl (talk) 17:39, 23 March 2017 (UTC)
yeah, welcome to wikidata. if you cannot collaborate with this researcher, then you have nothing to say to me. "If the metric is bad that's potentially harmful." = if a gatekeeper is bad then that is harmful. Slowking4 (talk) 15:42, 27 March 2017 (UTC)

My use case

As a big open project, it is important to have statistics showing how quality evolves over time. But more personally, here is the use case I would like to be able to have:

I spend a lot of time improving embassy items on Wikidata. A great tool would tell me: "Look at this embassy item, its picture is very small and over 80% of its properties have no reference".

Cheers! Syced (talk) 08:19, 23 March 2017 (UTC)

Great idea. Thanks Syced! --Glorian WD (talk) 15:12, 23 March 2017 (UTC)
If the output of this project is a quality score, then it won't tell you "the picture is very small". Given that Wikidata itself doesn't host the data about the image size I'm also not sure that the trained model would easily pick it up. For that use-case another output than a direct quality score would likely be better.
There are advantages to having statistics of how quality evolves over time but that's only true when the quality score measures what it's supposed to measure. ChristianKl (talk) 17:57, 23 March 2017 (UTC)

Landing (Information) Page

Hi folks,
Thanks for all responses! I do appreciate them :)
I have created a page for clarifying what I am trying to do. You can find that page here. I hope things can get more clearer now! --Glorian WD (talk) 17:13, 24 March 2017 (UTC)

Thoughts on Quality

I have my thoughts about quality and you can find them here. As you will read I do support the project by Glorian WD. It has potential, it is a first iterative step in the right direction and I support him in this. It will bring us one step in the right direction of better quality but it will not bring us an absolute quality. For that we need more discussion.

While I support this project also because of its limitations, it is important that a discussion about Wikidata qualities and how they apply to all the Wikimedia projects is held. This discussion should be open and assumptions held should be made transparent and discussed. Wikidata is not Wikipedia and what works for Wikipedia and its community does not necessarily work here. There are multiple objectives for this discussion.

  • Find a common ground and see how we can expand this.
  • Make clear that we are truly talking about Wikidata quality and not conflating this with external arguments.
  • Expand the understanding of the qualities of Wikidata and how they can be expanded
  • Build trust.
  • Grow the Wikidata community.

Thanks, GerardM (talk) 09:04, 25 March 2017 (UTC)

A Few Sets of Item Left Before We Are Done With the Pilot

Hi folks!
Thanks for your contribution in labeling the items on the pilot campaign! Based on the progress bar on the landing page, thanks to you all, we have a very few sets left before we are done with the pilot. Because of this reason, it would be really great if you can label some last few sets of item to finish this pilot campaign (i.e. there're only ~5 sets left) :).
Thanks a bunch guys. --Glorian WD (talk) 07:24, 28 March 2017 (UTC)

Pilot Campaign is Finished

Hi everyone!
Thank you very much for help labeling the items on the pilot campaign! Based on the progress bar on the landing page, I think we have done with this pilot campaign. I will start analyzing the result and share it to you. If you want to get the updates about the project, you can register yourselves on Wikidata:Item_quality_campaign. Thanks! --Glorian WD (talk) 09:05, 29 March 2017 (UTC)

Population size categories

Ladino Wikipedia has a series of categories by population (e.g., lad:Kateggoría:Lokalidades kon mas de 5.000.000 de avitantes). Do items exist for categories of this nature? I haven't been able to find any. Thanks for the help. StevenJ81 (talk) 17:09, 28 March 2017 (UTC)

Category:Million cities (Q7704657) for 1 million inhabitants. - Kareyac (talk) 04:32, 29 March 2017 (UTC)
Thanks. StevenJ81 (talk) 15:44, 29 March 2017 (UTC)
I found two more: Category:Megacity (Q9901373) for 10 million inhabitants, and Category:Big cities (Q9823231) for 100,000. (I had to create English labels for them.) StevenJ81 (talk) 15:57, 29 March 2017 (UTC)

Victoria, Australia

Are Q28931058, Wycheproof, parish in Buloke Shire, Victoria and Q2347199, Wycheproof, town in Victoria the same ?!?
Thx. Regards --Chris.urs-o (talk) 03:36, 29 March 2017 (UTC)
Likely no. A town isn't the same thing as a parish. ChristianKl (talk) 07:31, 29 March 2017 (UTC)
@Chris.urs-o: No, the parishes are used for property/land management, per Victorian county, parish & township plans.  — billinghurst sDrewth 13:09, 29 March 2017 (UTC)
Thx --Chris.urs-o (talk) 14:31, 29 March 2017 (UTC)

QuickStatments - Coordinates

Hello, While ingesting data using the Quickstatments Tool the coordinates have to be wirtten in the following format: @LAT/LON for example: @47.394051879999999/8.0459103449999994

Now if there already is an existing object with existing coordinates the Quickstatement Tool just add's new coordinates which are usually just slightly different from the old ones: Example Q1590954.

Is there a known workaround for this kind of issue? How do I make the Tool skip the coordinates, or even better, delete the old ones without me doing it manually? The reason it can't be done manually is, because there are some 13'000 objects which I am going to ingest.

Thank you in advance. Affom (talk) 12:29, 29 March 2017 (UTC)  – The preceding unsigned comment was added by Affom (talk • contribs) at 09:35, 29 March 2017 (UTC).

Hi @Affom:. The best way to do this is first to write a query to find out what the coordinates for the objects Wikidata already has, and then work out offline what you want to do with them.
If you want to delete them, the new version 1.1 of QuickStatements allows statements to be removed by preceding them with a minus sign -- so removal of the old statements just becomes part of your QuickStatements run.
On the other hand, if they are the same there may be no need to remove the old one, so you may just want to add the reference for the new one.
A couple of things further:
  • I note that the coordinates from Swiss Inventory of Cultural Property of National Significance, February 2017 (Q28962694) seem to have a lot of decimal places -- more than are probably physically meaningful. You might want to round them down a bit. (In which case they might not be so different from the ones we already have).
  • I see from the webpage that they are CC0, which is good. Co-ordinates are something we should always be very careful to check the licensing on, because sometimes databases of coordinates can be seen to have quite significant real-world financial value, and owners can be quite ready to go to law to assert.
  • If the coordinates turn out to be very different to eg de-wiki, it might be neighbourly to correct any values there which seem to be wildly wrong.
Hope this helps, Jheald (talk) 12:40, 29 March 2017 (UTC)

Data donation: Songkick IDs

I'm pleased to announce that Songkick (Q7561274) have donated a datafile with 155K of their Songkick artist ID (P3478). Magnus has kindly matched ~45K of these using the included MusicBrainz artist ID (P434), and is uploading has uplaoded those values. The rest are in Mix'n'Match, awaiting your kind attention.

Songkick's API is used by Spotify, Foursquare, Deezer, FanBridge, SoundCloud, Warner Music Group, Yahoo! Search, YouTube, Vevo, and others, so the potential reach of this collaboration is considerable. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 13:23, 29 March 2017 (UTC)

Property:grammatical gender?

It exists a generic gender of a scientific name of a genus (P2433) (e.g. only grammatical gender) suitable to specify a per-language grammatical gender? For example, in Italian a box (Q188075) is a feminine (Q1775415) thing. --Valerio Bozzolan (talk) 01:48, 24 March 2017 (UTC)

I do know that I had the most difficult time getting the property approved, because there was great fear that it would be used for purposes other than generic names of organisms, so no, that would be misuse. See the discussion of the property. - Brya (talk) 04:15, 24 March 2017 (UTC)
@Visite fortuitement prolongée: I've seen that you suggested "grammatical gender of latin language nouns" in that discussion, and I think that it could solve the problem. --Valerio Bozzolan (talk) 12:47, 24 March 2017 (UTC)
While the word "box" might have a grammatical gender in Italian that doesn't mean that the concept "box" (which might be represented by different labels) has a grammatical gender. When we will have the Wikidictionary integraton, it will allow you to specify the grammatical gender of the word but till then we don't have a property and I doubt a property proposal would be successful. ChristianKl (talk) 08:20, 30 March 2017 (UTC)
@ChristianKl: Thanks. Do you know where we can follow news about Wikidictionary integration? --Valerio Bozzolan (talk) 00:39, 2 May 2017 (UTC)
@Valerio Bozzolan: It will be announced via the usually weekly updates. Otherwise there are phabricator tasks like https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T161522 ChristianKl (talk) 21:05, 8 May 2017 (UTC)

No-editing slots due to a server switch on April 19th and May 3rd

Hello all,

The WMF will operate migration tests on their servers during a short time, on April 19th and May 3rd, at 14:00 UTC. During about 30 minutes, you will be able to read, but not edit, all the Wikimedia wikis.

During these short slots, if you try to edit a page, you will see an error message - don't panic :)

Here's the official announcement, feel free to share it or help translating it in your language.

Thanks, Lea Lacroix (WMDE) (talk) 09:56, 30 March 2017 (UTC)

Query Service: you can now create a template to explain what your query is doing

 
example of Query Helper


Hello there,

As you may know if you use the Query Service, the Query Helper displays a more human-readable version of your query, that you can use to modify parts of the query.

When building a query, you can now create a template to personalize this tool, and write a real sentence to explain what the query does, and allow users to simply modify it.

You can see an example here: the template displays the sentence "Presidents of United States of America and their spouses", and one click allows the user to replace the country by another one, and run the query again.

This may be useful to share queries and explain how the Query Service works :)

You'll find how to build your own templates here. You can place the template anywhere in your query: at the top, at the bottom for example, and of course, provide it in your favorite language. You may note that the content of the template will be added to the URL of the query. Some issues may occurs for that reason.

If you have any question or suggestion, feel free to ping me. Lea Lacroix (WMDE) (talk) 11:17, 30 March 2017 (UTC)

Lectures

Hoi, I did some work on Mrs Carla Hayden the Wikipedia article has it that she gave a lecture and this is part of the awards section. My question; I have added both "instance of" "lecture" and "instance of" "award" to Jean E. Coleman Library Outreach Lecture (Q6170599). Is this correct? Thanks, GerardM (talk) 15:18, 30 March 2017 (UTC)

Dead links

Since I have been more or less absent the last weeks, I ask here: Do we have any system to notify about dead external links yet? -- Innocent bystander (talk) 12:15, 30 March 2017 (UTC)

Most likely not--Ymblanter (talk) 19:01, 30 March 2017 (UTC)

Federation in the Wikidata Query Service

Hello,

We've been working on integrating some external databases in the Query Service endpoint. You can now query in the same time Wikidata and other free knowledge bases. For now, only databases released under the most compatible licenses, such as CC0, are available. Currently available:

Soon, we plan to also enable querying other databases, with licenses such as CC-BY. We plan to continue add endpoints based on user requests.

The currently available endpoints are listed here: https://query.wikidata.org/copyright.html

The documentation about the feature (which will also be updated when we add more endpoints) is in the Query Service User Manual.

Here are some examples to understand how to build such queries: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/User:Smalyshev_(WMF)/Federation

Thanks a lot for your input! If you have any question or problem, feel free to contact me. --Smalyshev (WMF) (talk) 00:25, 31 March 2017 (UTC)

Chanticleer Garden (Q5072666)

Chanticleer Garden (Q5072666) has as its Commons category Commons:Category:Chanticleer Garden Photographs by Derek Ramsey. Surely that cannot be right, and photos by other people should also be associated with this topic. - Jmabel (talk) 02:57, 31 March 2017 (UTC)

So fix it. Matěj Suchánek (talk) 12:11, 31 March 2017 (UTC)

Unicode Representation of Entity as "Also Known As"?

Some Entities spot the Unicode Representation (Emoji) as a AKA (mostly in English). Is there already any ruling about this? Personally I strictly think it should not be added to any language: 1) I feel there is a semantic difference from a symbol/emoji to a text-based "also known as". 2) The symbol/emoji has strictly no language. Rather I propose to use the unicode property for this use case. Positive example at the time of writing is EU, negative example at the time of writing is Germany. L00mi (talk) 07:27, 31 March 2017 (UTC)

Using invoke:Wikidata on cywiki

I've added the following code to all 10,500 living bird articles on cywiki: {{invoke:Wikidata|getValue|P51|{{{sain|FETCH_WIKIDATA}}}}} Is there a way to find out how many it actually calls up? Here's an example of where there is a audio (P51). Most of course sit there redundant until P51 i added. Thanks! Llywelyn2000 (talk) 13:57, 31 March 2017 (UTC)

Only if you add some kind of tracking category/link. Such option isn't included in core. I have brought this up several times, but... --Edgars2007 (talk) 14:33, 31 March 2017 (UTC)
Thanks. It'll come one day! Llywelyn2000 (talk) 15:13, 31 March 2017 (UTC)
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