Wikidata

Wikidata:Project chat/Archive/2020/08

< Wikidata:Project chat‎ | Archive‎ | 2020
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Special subclass with "identity of subject in context" (P4649) qualifier

United States senator (49th Congress) (Q98082257) is a subclass of US senator with a instance of (P31) statement with the qualifier identity of subject in context (P4649). It seems to be a new way to do subclasses. However, none of the samples on Property talk:P4649 or Help:Basic membership properties seem to cover this. Either we should add some constraint to identity of subject in context (P4649) to avoid it's applied to P279/P31 or add a sample to P4649.

Markus Krötzsch Svavar Kjarrval TomT0m Emw Bovlb Peter F. Patel-Schneider Daniel Mietchen Akorenchkin (Maximilian Marx) YULdigitalpreservation Jsamwrites (John Samuel) Waldyrious Malore David L Martin (David Martin) Arlo Barnes (Arlo James Barnes) alonsopaz23 (Leopoldo Alonso Paz Hernández) AWesterinen (Andrea Westerinen)

  Notified participants of WikiProject Reasoning --- Jura 06:11, 21 August 2020 (UTC)

--- Jura 08:21, 25 August 2020 (UTC)

Aussie question

I wonder why many Australian places have "Downs" in their name. What does "Downs" stand for ? Bouzinac (talk) 21:15, 27 July 2020 (UTC)

Probably referring to downland (Q1253315), from the Old English word dūn, meaning "hill", so an areas of chalky hills. See also Downs. -Animalparty (talk) 02:50, 28 July 2020 (UTC)
Bizarre. This query shows only ~350 cities in Australia (only three having "downs") :
SELECT ?localit_ ?localit_Label WHERE {
  SERVICE wikibase:label { bd:serviceParam wikibase:language "[AUTO_LANGUAGE],en". }
  ?localit_ wdt:P31 wd:Q486972.
  ?localit_ wdt:P17 wd:Q408.
}
Try it!
Bouzinac (talk) 08:46, 28 July 2020 (UTC)
But this query including subclasses of settelements shows 89 "Downs" in Australia: 
SELECT DISTINCT ?localit_ ?localit_Label WHERE {
  ?localit_ wdt:P31 / wdt:P279 * wd:Q486972.
  ?localit_ wdt:P17 wd:Q408.
  ?localit_ rdfs:label ?localit_Label.
  FILTER (LANG(?localit_Label) = "en")
  FILTER CONTAINS(?localit_Label, " Downs")
}
Try it!
--Dipsacus fullonum (talk) 09:02, 28 July 2020 (UTC)
Thanks but if you remove the #FILTER CONTAINS(?localit_Label, " Downs"), it times out? (i wished to know how many human settlement (Q486972) there was in Australia. There might be data quality issues, too…
Besides, wasn't able to show properly the Australian state. I've tried ;wdt:P131+ ?state but it does not show the best administrative level… Bouzinac (talk) 09:10, 28 July 2020 (UTC)
@Bouzinac: In Australian the use of Downs would be well-known on pastoral properties, especially long-established properties, less so for townships. It would be a throwback to the English settlement, the squatocracy, and something that continued on when the large grazing tracts were set up when they went into the hinterlands.  — billinghurst sDrewth 15:33, 1 August 2020 (UTC)

Edit request

Please link w:ary:فينلاندا and w:avk:Suomia to Finland (Q33). 2001:999:0:98CE:B793:1F4C:44A3:430D 01:06, 30 July 2020 (UTC)

I've added the first link, but the second link goes to a page that does not exist.  Hazard SJ  01:29, 30 July 2020 (UTC)
@Hazard-SJ: It does now. 2001:999:0:98CE:5EAF:78B0:26BE:FB4E 09:56, 1 August 2020 (UTC)
  Done  Hazard SJ  18:15, 1 August 2020 (UTC)

James Baker disambiguation project

@Kolja21:, @Emu:, @Eru:, @GZWDer: and whoever else is interested -- The ongoing project to disambiguate people names James, Jim, or Jimmy Baker and get the external IDs assigned to the correct items has a page at Wikidata:Guide to James Bakers whose discussion page seems like the right place for discussion of this project — Levana Taylor (talk) 04:17, 31 July 2020 (UTC)

Creating items for "conflation of ..."

Imho first we have to clarify how to add a person to Wikidata.

GND 141792116 = James W. Baker (* 1926) and other identifiers have been added to the following items:

Q18684454 = Jay W. Baker (* 1961), actor
Q97009609 = James W. Baker (* 1944), historian
Q97009736 = James W. Baker (* 1926), journalist

In all three cases the statement is marked with "depreciated rank", reason: "applies to other person". Instead the ID should apply to:

Q97300633, description: "conflation of Q97009736 und Q97009609" = a non existing person

There was an discussion on User talk:Levana Taylor#James Baker but no solution. --Kolja21 (talk) 04:56, 31 July 2020 (UTC)

@Kolja21: This way of adding data is bullshit. A correct is to add the property GND with no value for person without GND. The reference can be added to GND property using stated in with retrieved date. This means someone checked once that the item has no GND and this would prevent the addition of a wrong GND. At least if the importation is done correctly (first check of th epresence of GND property in an item before the addition of a GND value. Snipre (talk) 06:01, 31 July 2020 (UTC)
And for error in external databases, then a contact with the database administrator to mention the problem is the solution. Items are not a solution to solve temporary data conflict. Snipre (talk) 06:06, 31 July 2020 (UTC)
@Snipre: To your first point, I don't disagree; the problem in many cases is that there is a VIAF cluster that includes identifiers from several different people -- for example, 42049064 has the LC for James W. Baker (Q97009736) and the BNF for Jay W. Baker (Q18684454), and if people (or bots) aren't careful they could wind up concluding from the VIAF record that those are the same person and add many of Q97009736's identifiers to Q18684454 and vice versa. So we were trying to figure out something to do to the items to say "stop, don't add this or this identifier even if VIAf seems to indicate that you should." Your way is one possibility.
To your second point, though, it is often not possible to get external sources to correct their mistakes, so confusion will stick around for years and years. We have to have ways of keeping WD organized and not letting external identifiers bring their own chaos in. — Levana Taylor (talk) 06:22, 31 July 2020 (UTC)
I don't think conflation items are a good idea. Instead we might simply have a new deprecation reason like "identifier conflates multiple people". I'm not sure whether does not exactly match (Q42415624) or undifferentiated identifier value (Q68648103) do the job or whether a new item would be good. ChristianKl ❪✉❫
conflation (Q14946528) is already a reason for deprecation; I use this if an identifier is a conflation but the item isn't; if an existing item is a conflation (such as Matthew Jones (Q10514004)) I have kept the identifiers there for now but they could be marked as deprecated and copied to the relevant items. Peter James (talk) 13:32, 31 July 2020 (UTC)
@Peter James: Matthew Jones (Q10514004) was created for en:Matthew Jones (footballer, born 1980). The item can be merged with Matthew Jones (Q96942402). --Kolja21 (talk) 14:41, 31 July 2020 (UTC)
Most of the identifiers, all links to the item, and probably use in the sites the identifiers linked to, were intended for another Matthew Jones. Peter James (talk) 16:41, 31 July 2020 (UTC)
Yes, that's Wikidata ;) But no reason for creating a new item leaving the original item as invalid behind. Since you've corrected the errors already I've restored the original version and merged the two items. --Kolja21 (talk) 21:58, 31 July 2020 (UTC)
@Levana Taylor: I've corrected the GND in the examples given above and will try to add the GNDs for the people listed in Wikidata:Guide to James Bakers. Imho you should not start with VIAF clusters. Clusters are mixtures and not stable. Start with Library of Congress authority ID (P244), Bibliothèque nationale de France ID (P268), IdRef ID (P269) or other stable IDs. If you create items for conflated VIAF clusters it only confirms VIAF that a thing with the description "conflation of Q97009736 and Q97009609" exists. Please remember that VIAF is not a human. VIAF does not understand the meaning of the description. --Kolja21 (talk) 22:28, 31 July 2020 (UTC)
That is a good point. I will see what I can do about getting rid of those items. But I think it is still necessary to add all the IDs from the cluster to the conflated items, deprecated. Add the BNF for Jay W. Baker to James W. Baker, deprecated, and write "reason for deprecation: refers to different subject (Q28091153)," and as a source write "stated in: VIAF" with a date. That makes it known that this identifier is included in VIAF in such a way as to seem to apply to this person, but VIAF is wrong. Hopefully that will be clear to both humans and bots! — Levana Taylor (talk) 22:45, 31 July 2020 (UTC)

Update: I have transferred all IDs from the conflation items I created to their proper items and have requested deletion of the unneeded — Levana Taylor (talk) 07:11, 1 August 2020 (UTC)

Thanks. VIAF is already reacting in a positiv way. VIAF:1416355: Three wrong IDs deleted on 2020-07-30. --Kolja21 (talk) 16:12, 1 August 2020 (UTC)
I'm absolutely delighted that VIAF is fixing things, but does anyone here know whether they are actually looking at Wikidata:VIAF/cluster/conflating entities? Do they know about it? I've been trying to make my contributions to that page as clear and helpful as possible, but if they would prefer something else, I'll do that instead. — Levana Taylor (talk) 19:25, 1 August 2020 (UTC)

Revision of SourceMD; make it available again

Hoi, there is a new report on duplicate ORCID identifiers. This time there are 63. That is more than the number of duplicates at the time when SourceMD functionality was available. Arguably as a result of this ban we no longer update information about sciences. Given that it is easy to merge duplicates, that was demonstrated on a previous occasion, there is no valid reason to prevent it from running. Thanks, GerardM (talk) 06:20, 1 August 2020 (UTC)

Query inconsistent

(Wikidata newbie alert) I am working on a dump search and download tool for all Wikimedia projects. In order to find out which Wikimedia wikis exist I want to use this SPARQL query. While checking the data for consistency I found out that the Wikimedia database name identifier (Property:P1800) ist defined for Wikimania 2018 (Q28914449) but it does not show up in the query results. Any idea what could cause this?

<off-topic> Dump searching spoiler: 

$ target/release/wdgrep "asdfdefased" /c/Users/xyz/wpdumps/dewiki-20200701-pages-articles-multistream.xml -v --ns 0
Searched 21437.064 MiB in 8.467969 seconds (2531.5474 MiB/s).

</off-topic> --Count Count (talk) 21:10, 1 August 2020 (UTC)

The Wikimedia database name (P1800) claim in Wikimania 2018 (Q28914449) has deprecated rank. You do not see these claims with the wdt: prefix; instead, you can query for the property path p:P1800/ps:P1800 to see the wikimania2018wiki value as well [1].
Apart from that, I am not exactly sure what you are looking for, but consider having a look at the first two SQL queries in quarry:query/12744 as well. —MisterSynergy (talk) 21:20, 1 August 2020 (UTC)
Thanks!! There are also some wikis which are not (currently or ever) being dumped, so I am not sure from where to take the list of wikis for which dumps exist. I have raised this question on the Dumps mailing list. --Count Count (talk) 22:12, 1 August 2020 (UTC)
The rank was changed to deprecated in 2017, probably because the claim was added before the site was in Special:SiteMatrix; I changed it to normal rank. Peter James (talk) 09:35, 2 August 2020 (UTC)

legal case with multiple appeals

What might be the best way to cite a legal case (Q2334719) with multiple appeals?

I'm thinking in particular of w:Fish v. Kobach, which was a case in the w:United States District Court for the District of Kansas with at least two separate appeals to the w:United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit. The "Findings of fact and conclusions of law" by the District Court judge are available in Wikidata as Findings of fact and conclusions of law in Fish v. Kobach (Q97940156).

I am not an attorney, so I'm a novice guessing about this. It might be wise to try to ask someone with Wikipedia:WikiProject Law about this. However, it would seem to me appropriate to support having separate Wikidata entries for each court docket entry plus Wikidata entries for separate documents in each case. This case could have separate Wikidata entries for each of the following:

The two appeals should be cross linked with the case in the District court. Then any document in the case could be linked to the relevant court.

Does this make sense? Is there an example where this has already been done? I couldn't find one. Thanks, DavidMCEddy (talk) 04:01, 2 August 2020 (UTC)

Wikidata dump format

In file wikidatawiki-20200720-pages-articles-multistream-index.txt are lines: 

 638:207:Help:Contents
 638:208:Q78
 638:211:Q82
 638:212:Q83
 638:213:MediaWiki:Searchmenu-new
 638:214:Q84
 638:215:Q85

What it means? , I know Q_number, but first and second? In file wikidatawiki-20200720-pages-articles-multistream.xml for Q388 (Linux) is one contributor, in wikidata dump i saw only one or zero contributors. Next is text: 

 <text bytes="20522" xml:space="preserve">{"type":"item","id":"Q3880","labels":
 {"es":{"language":"es","value":"Curacaut\u00edn"},"en":   
 {"language":"en","value":"Curacaut\u00edn"},"de":
 {"language":"de","value":"Curacaut\u00edn"},"de-ch":
 ....
 :"statement","id":"Q3880$019A28D5-0EEF-450A-92C8-9991E17C46DA","rank":"normal","references":
 [{"hash":"e2e58eeb561f00a569ddba43fb700a569375d1c4","snaks":{"P143":   
 {"snaktype":"value","property":"P143","hash":"
 e4f6d9441d0600513c4533c672b5ab472dc73694","datavalue":{"value":{"entity-
 type":"item","numeric-id":328,"id":"Q328"},"type":"wikibase-
 entityid"}}],"P4656":  
 {"snaktype":"value","property":"P4656","hash"
 :"33e10e91dad3bc18854a076bfbf939f1ff2a6f3b","datavalue":{"value":"
 https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/w\/index.php?title=Curacaut\u00edn&oldid=849113951","type":"
 string"}}]},"snaks-order":["P143","P4656"]}]}],"P57
 ..

How interpret it? First I change quot; to " but what next?Borneq (talk) 18:14, 1 August 2020 (UTC)

The format of the lines in the multistream index are file-offset:page-id:page-title, as described on m:Data dumps/Dump format#Multistream dumps. The pages-articles-multistream dumps only contain information about the current revision of each page, not the entire history, and you should be able to parse the Wikidata text as JSON (the data model is described at mw:Wikibase/DataModel/JSON).  Hazard SJ  18:37, 1 August 2020 (UTC)
Splitted files have "100 pages"? ("Articles, templates, media/file descriptions, and primary meta-pages, in multiple bz2 streams, 100 pages per stream") , usually are 27 files = 2700 pages? whereas are millions pages. Edited: OK, files is more than 27 and have a lot of pages, one file is divided by 100 pages Borneq (talk) 19:45, 1 August 2020 (UTC)
Borneq, the number of unique file-offsets should tell you how many streams of pages are in the entire file. Most streams (except a few of the last ones that are generated) should have 100 pages (so each file-offset should appear in the index roughly 100 times). You can therefore approximate the number of pages by determining the upper bound, i.e. the number of streams, multiplied by 100 pages per stream.  Hazard SJ  03:05, 2 August 2020 (UTC)
additional question: In 10 GB first part are pages : Q15,Q17,Q18... but no properites like "instance of" (P31).Where are properties? in some file *sql*.bz2? or I must download not wikidatawiki-20200720-pages-articles-multistream1.xml-p1p235321.bz2 but wikidatawiki-20200720-pages-meta-current1.xml-p1p235321.bz2 or wikidatawiki-20200720-pages-articles1.xml-p1p235321.bz2? Borneq (talk) 05:16, 2 August 2020 (UTC)
thus is documentation User:Joshbaumgartner/property_available_summary/0-99 and all-in-one with statistics Wikidata:Database_reports/List_of_properties/all Borneq (talk) 06:03, 2 August 2020 (UTC)
At first, Q items only had labels, descriptions and sitelinks; properties were added later. The first is P6 with page number 3916689 [2]; P31 (page 3918489) was created soon after. Peter James (talk) 10:40, 2 August 2020 (UTC)

Mathematics

Please can you help me with stimutaneous equations

Quotation field

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T259440

Was the quotation property Property:P1683 recently reduced from 700 characters to 400 characters? I don't see an edit reducing it, but when I tried to edit by removing quote marks, it won't save because now it is too large, and says max is 400 characters. --RAN (talk) 16:59, 2 August 2020 (UTC)

Replaced /historic political entities

I have found multiple ways to encode political entities that were whole of partially replaced by another entity:

I would like to discuss how to use these terms for political entities. My interpretation of the current situation is that follows (P155) should *never* be used, while I would use replaces (P1365) when one of the entities involved starts or stops existing while I would use gained territory from (P7903) when both entities existed before and after the event. This also came up with the fusion of municipalities in Switzerland (eg Valbirse (Q17326749)) in a discussion with @Jura1: and the question if multiple entities are involved (eg multiple entities form a new entity together = fusion). There are two suggestions:

Personally I find significant event to be a "catch-all" if no specific property exists and in this case I think its more useful to use the specific property replaces (P1365). What are your opinions? Of course it may also be the best solution to simply use both gained territory from (P7903) *and* replaces (P1365) since in this case both apply (it is a replacement and a gain of territory). Note that this is further complicated by the fact that the entities in question are often human settlements (who do not cease to exist) and political entities (who do cease to exist) in the case of a municipality fusion. --Hannes Röst (talk) 21:00, 2 August 2020 (UTC)

Surinamese surnames

As you may or may not know when in 1863 the slaves of Surinam (Q7646305) had been freed, they were given surnames depending on the plantation they had belonged to. Via the Dutch National Archives it can be studied exactly what surname derived from what plantation. First of all I would like to add a property to each of these surnames that they originate from Surinam. Secondly I would like to link each surname to exactly the correct plantation. Let's take the example of the surname Seedorf (Q29533724) that was given to the slaves from plantation Berg en Dal (Q819296): how would you model that information? Is there a Property we could use on Seedorf (Q29533724) to indicate it is a name originating from Surinam? Is it best to apply country of origin (P495)? (And side question, would it be correct to use has cause (P828) with Staatsblad wet afschaffing van de slavernij in Suriname (Q53034946) (the law that frees the slaves in Surinam)?)

Secondly, I think that it is best to link the surnames to the specific plantations at each plantation wikidata item. I assume a new Property might need to be created for exactly this purpose; something along the lines of "Names given to slaves of this plantation"? I hope there are interested people that have constructive ideas on this topic. I looked for Wikiprojects related to the Wikidata:WikiProject Plantations in Suriname but I haven't found it yet. Any ideas on that? Ecritures (talk) 19:23, 2 August 2020 (UTC)

I suspect that some of these names didn't actually originate with the process in Suriname, but were imported from Europe, for example if the plantation was already named after a family. E.g., en:Seedorf is the name of various towns in Europe and may also be a surname due to that also. If it's clear that the name only originates from a specific plantation, then the property named after (P138) could be used to link the surname to the item for the plantation. Ghouston (talk) 00:47, 3 August 2020 (UTC)

Help creating a new item

Hi! I once created an item and the title is missing, and I don't understand much about Wikidata. Could someone help me? It's https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q82838278 and its name should be "Pensar con otros: una guía de supervivencia en tiempos de posverdad", and the author is "Guadalupe Nogués" (it just displays a code). Thank you!  – The preceding unsigned comment was added by Kegelschnitt (talk • contribs) at 12:29, 2 August 2020‎ (UTC).

Hi Kegelschnitt, I think the problem is simply that there is no "label" (name to refer to the item by) for this item in the language you are using to look at it, and no label for the author item forcing the software to refer to it by the code. Add the label (and a short "description," a few words saying what this item is) in the section at the top of the page; the "edit" link is at the top right corner. — Levana Taylor (talk) 14:45, 2 August 2020 (UTC)
There are no labels in English for Q82838278 and for the author, Q82838914. However, I don't know enough about Wikidata to feel comfortable fixing that, and I thought I should leave it to see if it might convince one of the Wikidata developers to consider a systemic fix for this.
For example, I would think it should not be hard to develop software so any time a label is absent for a particular Wikidata item in a particular language, the software would find the language closest to the desired language and use that. (This would require a matrix giving the "distance" between any two languages. However, such a matrix surely exists somewhere.) DavidMCEddy (talk) 15:06, 2 August 2020 (UTC)
@DavidMCEddy: We had some things along those lines in Commons, and discovered that (for example) Ukrainians really resented seeing any content in Russian. - Jmabel (talk) 18:23, 2 August 2020 (UTC)
I have provided English-language labels and descriptions for Thinking with others: a guide to survival in times of post-truth (Q82838278) and Guadalupe Nogués (Q82838914). For the former, if someone has a better way to do the description of a title with no official translation, feel free. - Jmabel (talk) 18:28, 2 August 2020 (UTC)
@Jmabel: It's interesting (but not surprising) that Ukrainians might "really resent seeing any content in Russian." I don't know, but I suspect that something similar might apply between Serbs and Croatians: If I understand correctly, the spoken languages are quite similar, and the biggest difference may be that Serbian is written in Cyrilic while Croatian is written in the Latin alphabet.
That's an argument against using simple syntactic similarity but not against the idea of have a matrix of "distinctions" between languages, giving acceptable substitutes for any language. It's also an argument for having an international committee to constantly update that matrix, e.g., if two nations get close to war.
Another alternative might be to automatically ask users who see a naked Q number to suggest a title to use in their language. That task could be simplified by giving them easy access to the name in other languages, sorted by some kind of similarity matrix.
??? Thanks, DavidMCEddy (talk) 19:56, 2 August 2020 (UTC)
Since the russian language is the mother tongue of a sixth to a third (depending of source) of Ukrainian people, I very doubt that « [all] Ukrainians really resented seeing any content in Russian ». All Ukrainians that you meet maybe? Visite fortuitement prolongée (talk) 20:19, 3 August 2020 (UTC)
@Visite fortuitement prolongée: Where did I write "all Ukrainians"? Why would you presume in that context that "Ukrainians" would mean citizenship rather than ethnicity or that I would think all people of a given nationality or ethnicity ever all agree on anything?
Obviously, the people who use Commons in the Ukrainian language and were concerned with what language it fell back to would be native Ukrainian-speakers, and a number of them complained about this. I feel like you are trying to find a basis for a grievance where none exists, reading a less-likely meaning into something that is obvious on the surface. - Jmabel (talk) 00:14, 4 August 2020 (UTC)

official name (P1448) // native label (P1705)

Hello I'd like to pinpoint a problem with official name (P1448) : its description, whatever wikidata language, has it that item should have only official local language. So I've been good faith reverted here https://www.wikidata.org/w/index.php?title=Q710&oldid=1245835824 . I've restated my statement in French because I think official name (P1448) should be broader and welcome any "official" statement about its name. See https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q183#P1448 . Am I correct suggesting a broader definition of official name (P1448) (official name used in any language by any government office) and keep local official name to the native label (P1705) ? Bouzinac (talk) 08:17, 3 August 2020 (UTC)

I agree, there is a major problem with assuming that there is a single official language in which a official name/native name can be stated. Often its as easy as that but in a case like Switzerland (Q39) there are 4 official languages (see here) and the single "most official" name of the country is in Latin and used if only one language can be used (eg on coins). On the other hand, you often want to have a single truthy statement when asking "what is the official name of Germany in its native language" and the answer should be "Deutschland", so this solution also strikes me as bad. So I am not sure your proposal is great for that purpose, we could use qualifiers (or ranks, but this sounds like a bad idea) to indicate which is the official native language and which are official names of the item in other languages. You could always use official language (P37) to figure out which uses of official name (P1448) are in native language and which ones are not, but I would be in favour of a rule that if official name (P1448) has more than one entry, then a qualifier (yet to be determined) *must* to be used. --Hannes Röst (talk) 15:04, 3 August 2020 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #427

 
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Discussions
    • Open request for adminship: Wiki13
  • Tool of the week
    • SQID allows you to analyse, browse and query Wikidata. SQID is inspired by Magnus Manske's Reasonator, but focuses on prominently featuring information about Wikidata classes and properties.
  • Development
    • The last week was our quarterly prototyping week. We worked on the following projects. None of them are ready for prime-time yet but we'll continue with them.
      • Slices: We've had a lot of requests for accessing dumps of a smaller part of Wikidata's data since rarely anyone needs the complete data in Wikidata. The tricky part is figuring out which part is needed and if any of that can be generalized. We looked into for example how to make dump generation faster so we could potentially produce more smaller dumps that only cover a part of Wikidata's data, either thematically (e.g. humans) or by type of data (e.g. only statements and English labels and aliases but not sitelinks or descriptions).
      • REST API: As part of our effort to make it easier to access Wikidata's data for programmers we looked into a REST API. We tried to see if we could cover the existing action API modules in a REST API. We could. We'll take this as input for our ongoing API work now.
      • Improving quality ratings through ORES: ORES can judge the quality of an Item automatically. It is currently not very good at it however. We tried a few things to make it more accurate and found some easy wins we'll probably make happen in the next weeks.
      • Query manipulator: One of the ways we could potentially improve the load situation of the Wikidata Query Service is by automatically analyzing and then redirecting a bunch of queries to other systems that are more suitable for that particular type of query. The nice thing about that would be that the person/program sending the query wouldn't have to care about it but it'd be done automagically for them. We tried to build such a system and the results look very promising but more work/experimenting is needed, especially together with the WMF Search team.

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here. If you want to help, you can also have a look at the tasks needing a volunteer.

Modelling status of a person as a prisoner - Molesworth Phillips (Q21786411)

Hi. Molesworth Phillips (Q21786411) visited Napoleonic-era France during a short period of peace in 1802 to 1803. However, when war resumed in 1803 he was detained as a prisoner until the collapse of Napoleon's regime in 1814. I've tried to model the situation using a qualifier on residence (P551) but I'm getting a constraint violation. Is there a better way to represent this? From Hill To Shore (talk) 17:11, 3 August 2020 (UTC)

You could look at place of detention (P2632) which is a sub property of residence (P551), however there is a point to be made that residence (P551) should allow a qualifier that describes the type of residence (legal/illegal/citizen/non-citizen/refugee/voluntary/involuntary etc). See also the discussion above about slaves, (how would that be represented)? I find for example this equally problematic as Frederick Douglass (Q215562) was enslaved in Baltimore.
Maybe you could use Molesworth Phillips (Q21786411)residence (P551)French First Republic (Q58296)has cause (P828)imprisonment (Q841236) together with place of detention (P2632) ? --Hannes Röst (talk) 17:45, 3 August 2020 (UTC)
@Hannes Röst: Thanks, that seems to work very well. From Hill To Shore (talk) 18:08, 3 August 2020 (UTC)
If a constraint violation stops you from modellings something sensible, then change the constraint. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 20:40, 3 August 2020 (UTC)
In principle, that is a good idea. In practice, I find it best to discuss the reason for the constraint to see if there is a better way to model the data (one of our core problems is editors constantly reinventing the wheel, creating inconsistent data). If the consensus is that there isn't an alternative (or the alternative is impractical) then we either remove the constraint or mark the item as an exception to the constraint. In this case, I think the proposed solution works quite well. From Hill To Shore (talk) 20:46, 3 August 2020 (UTC)

Election data

Is there an international repository for election results from different jurisdictions?

  • If yes, where is it and how can I access it?[1]
  • If no, might it be appropriate to nominate Wikidata for such a repository, starting with w:Missouri?

I ask, because I want to compute w:Wasted vote and the partisan w:Wasted vote#Efficiency gap at least for Missouri, then Kansas and for other states in the w:United States, time permitting. From my experience the hardest part of any analysis of this nature is getting the data.

I think I can get general election results for Missouri elections dating back to 1996 and maybe even 1878. If I do this, I could potentially document how I did it on Wikiversity. Further discussions of this could help crowdsource a project to post election results from all over the world to Wikidata. That could be accompanied by software in w:R (programming language) to compute wasted votes and the partisan efficiency gap for any jurisdiction for which it makes sense to compute such, starting with Missouri. A "Wikidata election data" project like this could potentially include software that would make it easy for Wikimedians to extract and plot "wasted votes" and the impact of partisan gerrymandering to accompany any article for which it seems relevant in Wikipedia, Wikiversity, Wikinews, etc.

Might you know of any other project to crowdsource similar data sharing via Wikidata? If yes, what is that and what has been that experience? If no, might this be the first of many?

What do you think? What do you suggest I do next with this?

If I hear nothing further, I plan to start with the Wikidata:Data Import Guide. However, I'd be more comfortable if I had feedback on this discussion.

Thanks, DavidMCEddy (talk) 23:50, 3 August 2020 (UTC)

    • Q7079532 seems to have general election results for 1878 - 2000.
I have not yet looked carefully at these sources. The data for 2018 may be in HTML or XML. The data for 2008 and 1996 is in PDF. My preliminary attempts to access earlier data have so far failed. However, Q7079532 explicitly says "Copyright is in the public domain." I'm not an attorney, but w:Feist Publications, Inc., v. Rural Telephone Service Co. established that copyright protection requires creativity, and a telephone directory was not sufficiently creative to qualify for copyright protection. I would assume that would apply to election results as well. Moreover, I believe that all publications of the US federal government are in the public domain, and I think it's true for most if not all publications of state governments in the US, like this.
I don't know how much of this I can complete in the time I have available for this, but I should be able to at least scrape some data for recent years and post such to Wikidata to serve as a platform for further discussion.
Comments? Thanks, DavidMCEddy (talk) 02:30, 4 August 2020 (UTC)

You may be interested in Wikidata:Property proposal/Open Civic Data Division Identifiers and the links discussed there, specifically https://developers.google.com/civic-information/docs/v2/divisions#resource and the OpenElections Project. It seems like they are doing something similar, see Missouri -- however, I cannot find a licence on their site. Best --Hannes Röst (talk) 19:42, 4 August 2020 (UTC)

References

  1. ↑ Ballotpedia has data on election results for some jurisdictions in the US for some time periods. I asked for access. The quoted me a "one-time fee of $439" for one state and one election cycle, and that was their non-profit rate. That may be reasonable for someone interested in just that state and election cycle, who can't easily scrape the data from the website of the Missouri Secretary of State. However, for someone like me, interested in (a) multiple years an all 50 states in the US, and (b) free access to the sum of all human knowledge, it's, in my judgment, outrageous. I'm a big supporter of other things that Ballotpedia does, but not that.

Newbie here

Hello there, I'm a Wikipedia user with nil presence on Wiki data. As I would wish to contribute COVID-19 pandemic in India, I'm just not able to edit & update parameters by clicking the editor. Would like to have someone providing with basic training. Aman.kumar.goel (talk) 03:32, 4 August 2020 (UTC)

@Sdkb: How should we try to help User:Aman.kumar.goel "contribute COVID-19 pandemic" data from India? DavidMCEddy (talk) 04:56, 4 August 2020 (UTC)
Aman.kumar.goel, I left a welcome message on your user page. {{u|Sdkb}} talk 07:20, 4 August 2020 (UTC)

A major collective failure to import COVID-19 pandemic data

About two months ago, myself and another editor at en-WP's WikiProject COVID-19 set up w:Template:COVID-19 pandemic data/Per capita so that it would automatically import data on case/death/recovery counts from Wikidata. This seemed like a good idea at the time, since it would get the data centralized at the project designed to host data and easily importable to any language, not just English. But it turned out that, since Wikidata itself was not importing the open, machine-readable data being published by Johns Hopkins or anyone else, the information for many smaller countries was so severely out of date that the table was unusable and had to be removed from the main page where it was intended to go, w:COVID-19 pandemic by country and territory. At this point, Wikidata:Requests for permissions/Bot/CovidDatahubBot has been open since mid-May, with no activity in the past month, and no takers on a request for help I put at the en-WP project page.

I recognize that importing data can be a tricky task, and I certainly don't fault any individual editor for not completing it sooner, since we're all volunteers. But in a collective sense, I can't escape the conclusion at this point that we at Wikidata have massively dropped the ball on this. The main statistics related to the COVID-19 pandemic have been the single most important data-related thing happening in the world since March, yet we're still unable to serve as the central data hub we ought to be.

As a result, we're seeing massive amounts of wasted editor effort across Wikimedia. At en-WP, editors are constantly having to manually update w:Template:COVID-19 pandemic data, and when they aren't fast enough, IP editors are cluttering talk pages of country articles with misdirected requests for updates. The editors making manual updates here at Wikidata are duplicating that work. Meanwhile at Commons, a whole community of map updaters has sprung up, since presumably a centralized system for automatically updating the maps can't be created until it has good locally-hosted data to work with. And at non-English Wikipedias, editors are having to either manually copy over the data from English Wikipedia or duplicate the updating work yet again.

The longer this situation goes on, the more entrenched this state of affairs becomes, making it harder and harder to convince editors to switch over to Wikidata hosting once our system is ready. So please consider this a last plea: can those of you with the requisite bot expertise prioritize getting the CovidDatahubBot operational? {{u|Sdkb}} talk 06:03, 27 July 2020 (UTC)

Wasn't it to be expected given the global and daily extent of the matter, plus the extreme shortage of volunteers? Wouldn't it be better to concentrate on doable projects right from the start? --SCIdude (talk) 07:17, 27 July 2020 (UTC)
A lot of the problems comes from peoplee misusing statements. Unfortunately, i have been guilty of this myself. I would like to correct it but the inability to change the order of statements without deleting them makes this work much more tedious it reasonable has to be Trade (talk) 09:54, 27 July 2020 (UTC)
Statements have no "order" unless explicitly qualified with such. Deleting and re-adding in a new order does not change any meaning. It just changes the UI. --SilentSpike (talk) 11:40, 27 July 2020 (UTC)
@Trade: to change order of values in any statement you can use this script. Joao4669 (talk) 22:23, 27 July 2020 (UTC)
Like this?--Trade (talk) 23:06, 27 July 2020 (UTC)
This is enough. Joao4669 (talk) 23:16, 27 July 2020 (UTC)
@SCIdude: The most efficient use of editor effort would definitely have been to get the importing working back around February. If that had been done, we would have saved collectively probably hundreds or thousands of hours of editor work. At this point, there are a ton of sunk costs, but given that the pandemic won't be ending anytime soon, it still ought to be an extremely high-priority task, even with limited editor resources. Is there really no one willing to take this on? {{u|Sdkb}} talk 23:29, 28 July 2020 (UTC)
@Sdkb: I share your frustration. Sadly, I'm on a high-speed treadmill with other projects AND have zero experience writing bots for Wikidata.
Might I humbly request your comments on my Wikidata:Project chat#Election data question below? That seems to have some but not all of the components of this COVID-19 pandemic data problem with a much longer time perspective.
I'd like to develop procedures for scraping data from websites, possibly using w:R (programming language), documenting them in "R Markdown vignettes", including them in Ecfun: Functions for Ecdat, and writing documentation in Wikiversity on how to do this, etc. If we had those kinds of tools in place, it could help with this COVID data problem.
In fact, it may be that pushing on both my "election data" and this "COVID data" projects simultaneously may make each progress faster than it would without the other.
Just brainstorming. DavidMCEddy (talk) 03:37, 4 August 2020 (UTC)
@DavidMCEddy: Thanks for pointing me to that connection! I don't have technical skills in this area (thus me having to post here rather than being able to take on the task myself), so I'm not sure I have any insights for your task other than that it seems like a very worthwhile thing to do. Perhaps someone more knowledgeable about Wikidata scraping can catch both of us up as to the state of the project's capabilities in this area? {{u|Sdkb}} talk 04:12, 4 August 2020 (UTC)
  • It was a Sisyphus-doomed job since Wikidata is almost forbidden when directly show in any wikilanguage project page. I have always been astonished at seeing a single multilingual data table is impossible to show, thus coming to the current "mess". Plus, the fact that graph linked to sparql no longer work since one year, adding to the current mess. Bouzinac (talk) 08:26, 4 August 2020 (UTC)
At Wikimedia:2019:Wikimania Stockholm I organized a brainstorming session on obstacles to faster Wikidata adoption. Wikimedia:User:Lydia Pintscher, the Product Manager for Wikidata, Wikimedia Deutschland, co-facilitated with me. I don't know what if anything has been done with the results of that session, but there are legitimate complaints about Wikidata that should be addressed. However, they won't be overcome if we only complain about them: We need to listen to their concerns and find ways of addressing those concerns.
I've been a Wikimedian for just over a decade. I've heard that the Wikipedia WYSIWYG editor was a failure and a waste of Wikimedia Foundation money. However, only recently, I managed to copy and paste text with formatting, etc., from a LibreOffice text document into the Wikipedia WYSIWYG editor in a new blank article page on en.Wikiversity. I was dreading it, because it in the past that task has been painful, and the procedure I had used before had been declared obsolete. Then I found the suggestion to do what I just described, and it worked like it was supposed to, to my astonishment! WMF software developers have been working hard and doing some things right!
In particular, the English-language Wikipedia user community is too big and too important to ignore. DavidMCEddy (talk) 12:34, 4 August 2020 (UTC)

┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘ @Bouzinac: above I cannot make sense of "Wikidata is almost forbidden when directly show in any wikilanguage project page", can you reword? - Jmabel (talk) 17:00, 4 August 2020 (UTC)

Hi Jmabel (talk • contribs • logs), sorry for my low English. I meant that it is somehow forbidden to use result of queries/tables inside many Wikipédia languages pages (note that talk pages are often allowed to show such results, with, say, Listeriabot). So, if you wish to have a table of, say, coronavirus cases numbers, you cannot show a single dataset stored at Wikidata to be used and shown among Wikipédias crosswise. So the updating work would have been only in Wikidata, making numbers updated instananeously amongst the Wikipédias.
Before the coronavirus need, I used to update many patronage (P3872) for airports, in the hope it would have updated numbers for airport wikipedia pages but I've been rebuked into displaying table-Wikidata-based + no longer able to show graph Wikidata-based. So I start to feel pointlessness of my work on patronage (P3872). Bouzinac (talk) 07:09, 5 August 2020 (UTC)

Buggies

horse and buggy (Q2632269): a few issues here, partly that it seems to be conflated with the much more specific Egyptian hantour. I can't work out which linked articles cover which concept, but one current result is that en:Horse and buggy is connected to commons:Category:Hantour instead of the much more likely commons:Category:Buggies.

en:Horse and buggy clearly matches:

It seems to me also to match:

  • Arabic ar:حنطور: you would hardly refer to an Amish hantour in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, but there is a picture of one in the article.
    • Western Panjabi : ditto
  • Farsi fa:درشکه (stub and I'm just going by the picture: it's in Iran, I don't think they refer to a hantour in Farsi, but maybe I'm wrong)

I'm not sure about Japanese ja:バギー (馬車) which is a sub-stub in a language I don't read;

Frisian fy:Kategory:Hynder en wein looks like it may be even broader than en:Horse and buggy.

So I think Commons is the odd one out, but I'm not completely confident because I don't read the non-Western languages here, and follow Frisian only insofar as it resembles German.

Anyway, I think there are at least two different things here, maybe more, and would appreciate if someone more knowledgable on the subject would sort it out and hook commons:Category:Buggies somewhere appropriate. - Jmabel (talk) 03:49, 5 August 2020 (UTC)

Historic England names

Sometimes wrong, not necessarily unique, and often not familiar to users. Please follow Commons naming conventions, because we are forced to disambiguate by location to help users, and think about what we are doing. By all means, use HE names as aliases but not as principal names. Also, their geogoords are not systematic. Commons are. Please use those in preference, unless they are wildly inaccurate. Thanks. Rodhullandemu (talk) 07:09, 4 August 2020 (UTC)

@Rodhullandemu: Can you please provide an example item of where you see a problem? Also, are you referring to some names used by "Historic England" the organisation or to "historical names of places in England?" We can look into the problem but we can't guarantee the use of naming to suit Commons, as we need to support all Wikimedia projects. If you look a few sections above, we have received a request to match our descriptions to English Wikipedia. There is no way we can be in perfect alignment with the naming conventions of all projects. From Hill To Shore (talk) 07:34, 4 August 2020 (UTC)
@From Hill To Shore: On the HE names, they list Q26320984 as "Monument of Edward VII" but I am pretty sure it won't be the only one. Commons, and now Wikidata, use a much more useful name, "Equestrian statue of Edward VII, Liverpool". There are myriad similar examples. To be useful, data should not be ambiguous. I've recently seen pages merged, but to incorrect names without the location. HE gets worse with things like "The Lodge" and "The Cottage" because they are overloaded names with multiple matches. As for doing what Wikipedia does, no thanks. Rodhullandemu (talk) 16:20, 4 August 2020 (UTC)
Help:Label states that the label should be "the most common name that the item would be known by" and in the case of Q26320984 I actually highly doubt that "Equestrian statue of Edward VII, Liverpool" fulfills this criteria, simply because a Google search does not turn up any results outside of Wikimedia Commons. So I think *always* using the Commons Category name here is not the right approach. Also note that unlike commons category names, Wikidata item labels do not have to be unique, so we can get around a lot of the issues caused by this and we do not have to put the place (Liverpool) into the name of the item. Personally, I highly doubt that local people would refer to this statue with the qualifier ", Liverpool" but again I am not from there so I dont know.
Note that the label is not the "most useful name" but the name most people would know it by. Wikidata specifically allows multiple items to have the same name and differentiates them by other means (description, statements etc). --Hannes Röst (talk) 17:58, 4 August 2020 (UTC)
All to the detriment of human interaction. A lot here may be automated but ultimately it all has to be human-maintainable if necessary. The name most people would know it by in Liverpool is "that guy on the horse at the Pier Head", but I doubt that's very useful. What we need are names that are beyond criticism in any context, and thus unique. Disambiguating by Q numbers is OK for machines, but not people. Forget what Google says, it's not clever. It will throw up that statue, but not directly. Also, I don't get here that often, so if you don't Ping me, I won't know unless I happen to look at my watchlist. Let's be a bit more people-friendly. Thanks. Rodhullandemu (talk) 22:09, 4 August 2020 (UTC)
Names are unique once you include the description, which happens to be their raison d'être. So the label is what the thing is genuinely called, and equestrian details are well accomodated in the description. Example: The Seagull (Q97381862) is a HE site, and one of about a dozen things we have collectively amassed called "The Seagull". When both label & description are shown, the result is pretty much exactly what people want when they add disambiguation into the label: The Seagull (wreck of a historical paddle steamer). But clients have to make use of the description wherever it is necessary. Getting both pieces of data is marginally different than just getting label, and unlike the cup of coffee I just dropped, it is trivially easy to fuse them into a coherent entity, while it would be impossible to reliably split them apart for cases where just the label is needed, or the components are to be individually styled, if they came "pre-mixed". Matthias Winkelmann (talk) 03:22, 5 August 2020 (UTC)
Well (thanks for the ping) that's another problem. "Wirral, Merseyside, CH43" is not a description, it's a location, unless we are using language in a novel and bizarre way (Q26513608). "Grade II listed estate lodge" is a description. Rodhullandemu (talk) 17:47, 5 August 2020 (UTC)
@Rodhullandemu: In this case the description should probably read something like "heritage building in the UK" or something and "Wirral, Merseyside, CH43" should go into street address (P6375). In many cases the Commons category name is probably appropriate but not in all cases, for example if the Commons category name works around uniqueness constraints in Commons that do not apply here. If something is called "The Seagull" then that should be its name here. --Hannes Röst (talk) 20:15, 5 August 2020 (UTC)

What's the best way to add the ethnic composition of a region?

I am looking to add the racial/ethnic composition of California (Q99). What is the best way to do that? Adding a ton of population counts with "applies to part" would pretty quickly overwhelm that field (given that there are different years as well), so that seems like not the best option. Would there be a way to add it to demographics of California (Q3044234), which is currently basically empty? {{u|Sdkb}} talk 05:40, 5 August 2020 (UTC)

Notification about a proposed global ban of User:Eric abiog

Please help translate to your language

Dear community,

pursuant to the global ban policy, I would like to notify your community I have proposed that User:Eric abiog to be globally banned by the global Wikimedia Community.

You are invited to discuss the case in a request for comment that is running at the Meta-Wiki.

Best regards,
Martin Urbanec (talk)

Delivered by --MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 16:11, 5 August 2020 (UTC)

Delete mix'n'match catalogue

The mix'n'match catalogue about inactive FIDE chess players is repeatedly used to create new items, although it is agreed in the chess wikiproject that having a FIDE profile is not sufficient for notability. I would therefore like to delete the catalogue (or have it deleted by an admin), where can I request this? Steak (talk) 06:08, 5 August 2020 (UTC)

You mention having a consensus. Can you provide a link to the previous discussion? From Hill To Shore (talk) 07:48, 5 August 2020 (UTC)
Unless we have a clearly-defined criterion for inclusion, we should create items for all entries for all FIDE chess players and undelete all items deleted in the past. I do not like an arbitrary criterion.--GZWDer (talk) 15:58, 5 August 2020 (UTC)
We have a clear notability criterion, namely "titled player". In the FIDE database are ~300.000 players, with many of them on beginner or amateur level. It would be absurd to say that they are all notable. We had a discussion at this place before (Wikidata:Project_chat/Archive/2016/10#Notability_of_chess_players) and this is the line that we have been following the last four years. Steak (talk) 17:25, 5 August 2020 (UTC)
When I read such discussion, I do not see an agreement for that (@ChristianKl:). Instead it may suggest "every player is notable if its FIDE profile may be attributed to a specific individual".--GZWDer (talk) 04:35, 6 August 2020 (UTC)

Huggle issue

Hi greetings. Would you do me a favour? I am using huggle to revert vandalism in Wikipedia. I used it on other wikis also. But always, when I tried to revert edits in item pages in Wikidata, huggle does not work. It can give messages in talkpage, but couldn't revert edits. What is the reason behind this? Would you mind helping me? Thank you.--PATH SLOPU 04:36, 6 August 2020 (UTC)

Difference between Chingissid (Q3100718) and Descent from Genghis Khan (Q2371643)?

It seems to me that difference between Chingissid (Q3100718) and Descent from Genghis Khan (Q2371643) is not clear, and I'd like some input on how to sort them out. Chingissid (Q3100718) is more well-defined, it seems sitelinks of Chingissid (Q3100718) are all about descendants of Genghis Khan. (but I'm not entirely sure since I don't understand most of the languages)

However, Descent from Genghis Khan (Q2371643) is a bit of mess. The English article en:Descent from Genghis Khan addresses the concept of descent, while German de:Dschingisiden, French fr:Descendance de Gengis Khan and Mongolian mn:Алтан ураг (Altan urag or Golden Lineage) are about the descendants. The Japanese article ja:チンギス統原理 (Chingisid principle) discusses the law that only descendants of Genghis Khan were eligible to be khan (Q181888). Catalan ca:Nirun and Russian ru:Нирун-монголы should probably be moved to Q2536110, since they both discuss Nirun, which is broader than Chingissid (Q3100718) and include descendants of three sons of Alan Gua (Q2504245) (Genghis Khan is a 10th generation descendant of Bodonchar Munkhag (Q4090003), one of the three sons and founder of Borjigin (Q1059073)).

Besides, most categories in Category:Chingissid (Q9882513) and Category:Descendants of Genghis Khan (Q16815917) seem to have the same scope, but some of them (such as Hebrew he:קטגוריה:המשפחה הג'ינגיסית and Chinese zh:Category:成吉思汗家族) only include immediate family members of Gengis Khan, instead of all descendants of him. Any thoughts? --Stevenliuyi (talk) 05:36, 6 August 2020 (UTC)

Technical Wishes: FileExporter and FileImporter become default features on all Wikis

The FileExporter and FileImporter will become a default features on all wikis until August 7, 2020. They are planned to help you to move files from your local wiki to Wikimedia Commons easier while keeping all original file information (Description, Source, Date, Author, View History) intact. Additionally, the move is documented in the files view history. How does it work?

Step 1: If you are an auto-confirmed user, you will see a link "Move file to Wikimedia Commons" on the local file page.

Step 2: When you click on this link, the FileImporter checks if the file can in fact be moved to Wikimedia Commons. These checks are performed based on the wiki's configuration file which is created and maintained by each local wiki community.

Step 3: If the file is compatible with Wikimedia Commons, you will be taken to an import page, at which you can update or add information regarding the file, such as the description. You can also add the 'Now Commons' template to the file on the local wiki by clicking the corresponding check box in the import form. Admins can delete the file from the local wiki by enabling the corresponding checkbox. By clicking on the 'Import' button at the end of the page, the file is imported to Wikimedia Commons.

If you want to know more about the FileImporter extension or the Technical Wishes Project, follow the links. --For the Technical Wishes Team:

Max Klemm (WMDE) 09:14, 6 August 2020 (UTC)

Secretary of State Q736559

This item should be splitted. In some languages/country it is a political function e.g. the Netherlands and the US. In other countries it is a civil servant. I would not know how to executed this, perhaps somebody wants to do some study on this point. Ellywa (talk) 16:02, 18 July 2020 (UTC)

    • I hadn't looked at what inherited from it. Yes, there does seem to be a confusion or conflation here of multiple concepts, and the English-language article, at least, seems to be about a term, rather than a concept, hence inevitably a conflation of concepts. - Jmabel (talk) 06:53, 19 July 2020 (UTC)
  • The enwiki article en:Secretary of state is more or less an informal list article, or disambiguation page. I've changed the English description on secretary of state (Q736559) to "government positions that have "secretary" and "state" in their title, or equivalents in other languages", which appears to be the topic at hand. If a position is an instance or subclass of that, it doesn't mean much. Ghouston (talk) 10:55, 6 August 2020 (UTC)

A.D W Wolmarans.

I have information on this South African Politician and would like to help develop this profile  – The preceding unsigned comment was added by Drika Aucamp Brown (talk • contribs) at 12:22, 5 August 2020 (UTC).

Hi Drika Aucamp Brown! If you're referring to Andries Daniël Wynand Wolmarans, then there is a Wikidata item for this entity here. Feel free to add statements to it using publicly available sources. If you need help doing so, take a look at Adding_statements or ask on this page as well. -Mohammed Sadat (WMDE) (talk) 11:10, 6 August 2020 (UTC)

Editing countries item and perf concerns

Hello, countries item are becoming very large and difficult to edit. Would it be possible to move, say, population (P1082), diplomatic relation (P530), life expectancy (P2250), etc of a country to a specialized item that would collect data about that country. And that country would have a link to this detailed item, instead of collecting population data. Something like statement is subject of (P805) or annexes. Bouzinac (talk) 20:27, 30 July 2020 (UTC)

Recently discussed at Wikidata:Project chat/Archive/2020/05#Items for countries are getting too large. —Scs (talk) 20:46, 30 July 2020 (UTC)
There have also been quite a few other discussions recently on the scope of country items, which also has a direct impact on their size in very many cases. One of the key issues here is that an item for a country usually represents multiple conceptually distinct things — e.g. a territory and a regime (or, in many cases, a series of regimes) responsible for governing that territory. But how this is modelled is inconsistent even for current countries never mind historic countries/regimes. So, for example, look at the multiple inception (P571) entries on somewhere like Spain, or the differences in instance of (P31) on the items for the predecessors of French Fifth Republic (Q200686): 
SELECT ?item ?itemLabel ?inception ?p31 ?p31Label ?rank WHERE {
  ?item ^wdt:P1365* wd:Q200686 ; wdt:P571 ?inception ; p:P31 [ps:P31 ?p31 ; wikibase:rank ?rank] .
  SERVICE wikibase:label { bd:serviceParam wikibase:language "en". }
}
ORDER BY DESC(?inception)
Try it!
I think there is widespread agreement that things are a bit of a mess, and that on the current trajectory items are going to get worse (and certainly larger), but there is so far very little agreement on how to proceed. My suspicion is that if we could solve the problem of not currently being able to generate lists of countries at a given point (e.g. to replicate that portion of Wikipedia pages like List of state leaders in 1939 etc), we would likely also end up with significantly smaller item sizes in most cases. --Oravrattas (talk) 07:10, 1 August 2020 (UTC)
Did you mean that population, life span data, etc should be moved from France (Q142) to French Fourth Republic (Q69829) pertaining to the dates 1946-1958? Well... it might be raising a big debate, if it hasn't yet. Bouzinac (talk) 16:07, 2 August 2020 (UTC)
No, I wasn't suggesting that — population seems more connected to territory than regime. (diplomatic relation (P530) perhaps, though.) The issue raised here (and several times before) was that items for countries are getting too large. The proposed solution was to move several properties elsewhere. My comment is that a key underlying factor is that most existing items for country break the underlying preference in Wikidata that an item be about a single concept. Elsewhere on this page right now is a discussion about how islands should usually have separate items for the geographical entity and the administrative entity: but we don't take this same approach for non-island countries. Often we do end up with lots of items for the different concepts because one or more Wikipedias will have split things out, but these tend to be quite inconsistent (both within a single country, and compared to other countries), and often have lots of duplication. So, continuing with France as an example, as well as the various items for the regimes over time (which are quite inconsistent in terms of even their instance of (P31) entries, never mind what other properties are used), we also have a lot of duplication across France (Q142) and Metropolitan France (Q212429) (and for lots of things that aren't currently duplicated it's unclear which of those articles would actually be best, or whether even more should be duplicated). I am not advocating any specific solution to this (the best suggestion I have seen so far is that we probably want something akin to the work/edition split for books, but I certainly don't know what all the nuances of that would be) — just noting that the deeper underlying problem here is that country items currently 'mean' multiple different things in most cases, and that splitting those up into distinct items would likely help with item size. --Oravrattas (talk) 07:45, 3 August 2020 (UTC)
I have been thinking about the issue for some time. Specialized items like "demographic data on France" raise tricky issues. Pointing to tabular data stored on Commons would be better in a lot of ways. Most importantly perhaps, it does not require a CC0 license. Right now, because of licensing problems, tons of useful data cannot be added to Wikidata (or in some cases end up being added but in a disjointed, haphazard way). In case anyone is willing to work in that direction, I am definitely willing to help. -Zolo (talk) 18:13, 6 August 2020 (UTC)

Number of slaves

I would like to add the 'number of slaves' to a Wikidata item of a plantation. Of course there is population (P1082) but that doesn't sit right with me, because that would also include the non-slaves at a plantation (like the owners and their family). I do see several properties containing 'number of ...' like number of participants (P1132), number of subscribers (P3744) or number of points/goals/set scored (P1351). For obvious reasons none of these seem correct to be used in the case of 'number of slaves'. Should I create a new property request 'number of slaves' (that can be used with 'point in time') or is there another property I overlooked? Ecritures (talk) 19:30, 2 August 2020 (UTC)

I guess you could try with a qualifier applies to part (P518) and create an item for "slave population" if there are only a few plantations that you would want to edit. Otherwise I would follow in the path of female population (P1539) if you plan to add this to many items and code it like this. --Hannes Röst (talk) 21:35, 2 August 2020 (UTC)
Maybe owner of (P1830) enslaved person (Q12773225) with quantity (P1114) qualifier, although I'm not sure if P1830 is supposed to be used with "class" items like slave. You'd have the same problem with cattle or vehicles or anything else that can be owned in quantity, so I don't think a property specifically for slaves is a good idea. Ghouston (talk) 00:35, 3 August 2020 (UTC)
I would really suggest an "enslaver of" property distinct from owner of (P1830). Property:P1830 suggests a legitimacy I don't think we should grant to slave ownership. - Jmabel (talk) 15:37, 3 August 2020 (UTC)
I also think that there are two different concepts here: one is the population living at a geographical place and then there is ownership tied to a specific person. @Jmabel we probably have to distinguish between (i) legal ownership / (ii) illegal ownership at the time and (iii) "practice of ownership that was legal at the time and is unlawful now". You would have similar issues with Le Chemin, Paysage à Meudon (Q16986937) which was confiscated by the Nazis (at the time considered legitimate and not today) and restored to the rightful owner in 1997. I think we could use Property:P1830 as long as we add that it may also be used for illegitimate / illegal use or we could create new properties to distinguish the above types of ownership. --Hannes Röst (talk) 15:50, 3 August 2020 (UTC)
There is a big difference between owning a painting, where there may be room to argue over who is the legal owner, but not over whether ownership of such a thing is legal, and ownership of a human being. And, yes, slavery was legal at one time. Still, makes me rather uneasy, and I think we should have a distinct property. Question: would you use Property:P1830 to express the relation between a present-day sex trafficker and a person they enslave? - Jmabel (talk) 00:25, 4 August 2020 (UTC)
I have an interest as I have been working a lot with slave owner and slave trader data (and a bit less with slaves). We should probably note the work that goes on outside Wikidata to help us in deciding how to model these sorts of relationships. I have been guided somewhat by the documents developed by the Enslaved project (see https://docs.enslaved.org/controlledVocabulary/ and click on 'V1"). They use the terms "master" or "owner" and "enslaved person". While their ontology and vocabulary are available now, they haven't launched yet, and it will be worth looking again when they do. It may make us uneasy to label a person as property of another (I've certainly had qualms), but that was the legal reality at the time of the relationship we are describing. So I use owner of/owned by currently but am not opposed to a more specific property if that was widely supported.
Wrt Ecriture's original query though, I'll be interested how it turns out. There are potentially thousands of distinct plantations where we have a value for numbers of slaves at a point in time (e.g. all the plantations listed in the Legacies of British Slave-ownership database) so how to model it consistently matters. I see we have properties like 'literate population' and 'illiterate population' so I don't see why we shouldn't have 'slave population' as well. DrThneed (talk) 21:44, 6 August 2020 (UTC)
I oppose using "Owner of" with quantity as that means you can't reason anymore about whether two people own a shared object. I think we should have a new "owners objects of the class" property instead. As far as this usecase goes either employees (P1128) or population (P1082) with qualifiers seem doable. ChristianKl ❪✉❫ 12:17, 6 August 2020 (UTC)

People's height

Someone made a request on my bot-talk page (user talk:edoderoobot to change the height of people in my script from meters to centimeters, as this is more often used. Or, if that makes more sense (to the ISO standard it will) the other way round. To be clear, I only mean meters and centimeters, so please keep the inches and other non-ISO measurements for another discussion. As my script is almost done with female soccer players, I will not change it there, but if there is consensus on it, I can convert the meters into centimeters. Having a mix of two systems is theoretically not an issue, but what will be an issue, is showing the values form wikidata in infoboxes on several wikipedia's. Without a smart module, it will not work well with a mix of units. Edoderoo (talk) 18:00, 5 August 2020 (UTC)

I don't know anything about the task, but I'd say time would be much better spent working on a nice, general, central mechanism to support extracting Wikidata quantities in any desired unit, rather than on the completely pointless task of tinkering with the units in which they're actually stored. —Scs (talk) 23:28, 5 August 2020 (UTC)
This is at least partially possible. Via WDQS, you can retrieve "normalized" quantity values where the value and the unit are normalized to some SI base unit. For units of length, everything is normalized to "metre". You need to use the psn: prefix on statement nodes to access this data. No idea whether something similar exists for Lua access, though. ---MisterSynergy (talk) 07:13, 6 August 2020 (UTC)
Fundamentally, Wikidata relies on sources. If a source states person's height in centimeters (meters, feet, inches, etc.), Wikidata should claim it in centimeters (meters, feet, inches, etc.). --Matěj Suchánek (talk) 08:58, 6 August 2020 (UTC)
No, it says above that we technically store data in meters. Let's stick to the International System of Units (Q12457). For any exotic type of units of measure such as foot (Q3710) or ell (Q214377), there is a object stated in reference as (P5997). Carn (talk) 09:11, 6 August 2020 (UTC)
I strongly disagree we should stick to SI. Technically, we do not enforce any unit but store data with whatever unit they were imported. Conversion should be done explicitly by data consumers (e.g. the way mentioned above), so that Wikidata is not responsible for e.g. rounding errors causing divergence from the original source of data (which Wikidata is supposed to record). Inability to display data in Wikipedia infoboxes with a preferred isn't valid argument for storing data with just several chosen units (cf. w:cs:Blidinjské jezero and Q884054#P2046). --Matěj Suchánek (talk) 09:47, 6 August 2020 (UTC)
Wikidata is not only about storage - "it has been saved and forgotten". It is about using the data too. And maintaining a whole zoo of different strange units of measurement is a strange position in my opinion, leading to increased technical costs. Carn (talk) 12:23, 6 August 2020 (UTC)
If there's a mechanism to fetch a value converted to a unit specified by the extractor, you get the best of all worlds:
  • No tedious, error-prone conversions by people entering data
  • No precision loss when converting when entering data
  • Explicit unit tags on stored data means no mistakes due to assuming what unit it's in
  • Explicit unit specification while fetching values means extractors always receive them in units they like
Explicitly-tagged quantity systems are somewhat of an acquired taste, I'll admit, but they really do confer some significant benefits, and the impression I get is that everyone who cares about data fidelity has been shifting to explicitly-tagged quantities ever since the Mars Climate Orbiter (Q574464) accident. —Scs (talk) 13:33, 6 August 2020 (UTC)
@Carn: No, quantity data is stored in Wikidata along with an explicit unit tag, so in fact it can be stored in any unit. The statement you're referring to has to do with how the data is retrieved. Hypothetically, there are three ways to retrieve quantity data:
  1. In whatever unit it was stored.
  2. Normalized to SI units.
  3. Converted to whichever unit you (the retriever) specify.
In my experience, number 3 is the most useful, although it sounds like it might be the one we're missing. —Scs (talk) 12:09, 6 August 2020 (UTC)
Most wiki's use a very simple module to retrieve any property, so it can be used in an infobox. It is missing any feature, so if there are two different heights (or whatever property) stored, it retrieves the first one, or both, and results get unpredictable. With Lua you can write a more sophisticated way to retrieve values, and convert them on the fly, but this is not available yet (as far as I'm aware, not for all wiki's). But maybe such a module would be the better solution. Maybe a nice gadget for a next hackaton? Edoderoo (talk) 13:53, 6 August 2020 (UTC)
If a wiki retrieves data and just uses the first snak of a statement, it is the wiki's problem. They need to pay attention to the qualifiers, the rank and - if applicable - the unit. There can be qualifies determining that a certain statement is not valid any more (i.e. has an end date), was valid at a certain point of time long ago etc. pp. Yellowcard (talk) 15:36, 6 August 2020 (UTC)
Most templates on svwiki can handle convertions of most "convertible" units. What it needs is conversion to SI unit (P2370) both on the unit you are converting from and the unit you are converting to.
Celsius/Farenheit/Kelvin is still an issue, though. And of course "non-convertible" units like height=3 apples. 62 etc (talk) 15:45, 6 August 2020 (UTC)

How do we take into account inflation for cost (P2130)?

I'm adding the cost of construction for a building constructed in 1932, which was USD $600,000 at the time. Do I just put 600,000USD for the cost, or do I convert to today's dollars and put that, or something else? {{u|Sdkb}} talk 15:18, 6 August 2020 (UTC)

Maybe allow "as of" (P585) as a qualifier to P2130? 62 etc (talk) 15:33, 6 August 2020 (UTC)
would make a lot of sense to me. --Hannes Röst (talk) 17:34, 6 August 2020 (UTC)

Workplace

I would like to describe the workplace - worker relationship, for example for baker/bakery. It seems we have workplace (Q628858) which can be used bakery (Q274393)subclass of (P279)workplace (Q628858)of (P642)baker (Q160131) which is already quite convoluted. The opposite seems even harder, I have found this solution which would translate to baker (Q160131)uses (P2283)bakery (Q274393)object has role (P3831)workplace (Q628858). For such a common use (there are tons of relations: "job description" works in "job site" to practice "job practice") it seems awfully convoluted. Is there a better property I have not found yet (there is work location (P937) and employer (P108) but both do not seem quite adequate) or should we think about a new property here? Note that we have a much better modelling of baker (Q160131)field of this occupation (P425)baking (Q720398) and baking (Q720398)practiced by (P3095)baker (Q160131). Best regards --Hannes Röst (talk) 17:32, 6 August 2020 (UTC)

Uploading databases in the public interest

Would you consider uploading and hosting databases like UN and national statistics databases? The wonderful query interface would allow for all kind of interesting data to be found. There would be many benefits from this, including the improving of Wikipedia. Barecode (talk) 12:33, 6 August 2020 (UTC)

  • Wikidata doesn't upload databases in the form of tables the way the UN publishes them. Wikidata has linked data. Some data can be fits into our models and other doesn't. If you have particular data that you are interested in uploading to Wikidata, feel free to be more specific. ChristianKl ❪✉❫ 13:18, 6 August 2020 (UTC)
@Christian: - I am quite sure those tables can be adjusted for uploading at Wikidata. Also Wikidata can create a subdomain with minor modifications that can keep such data and also use the same query engine it is using now for that data. Barecode (talk) 13:49, 6 August 2020 (UTC)
If you have a table that you want to integrate into Wikidata, feel free to think through integrating it. ChristianKl ❪✉❫ 15:19, 6 August 2020 (UTC)
You can run your own instances of https://wikiba.se/ if that is what you mean with "create a subdomain" and use the query engine of Wikibase (that we have here in Wikidata) there. Is that what you mean? --Hannes Röst (talk) 17:36, 6 August 2020 (UTC)
User:John Cummings has worked extensively with importing UNESCO data. - Jmabel (talk) 23:31, 6 August 2020 (UTC)

Question about en-WP's Wikidata template

Could anyone help me out at w:Module talk:Wd#Seeking newest value, rather than current value? {{u|Sdkb}} talk 02:08, 7 August 2020 (UTC)

@Sdkb: that is certainly doable in LUA Ghuron (talk) 09:33, 7 August 2020 (UTC)

"character"

What, if any, is the item for the kind of "character" meant in the phrase "suffering builds character" -- i.e. good personality traits, good habits, virtuous ideas, etc.? Sometimes qualified as "good character" or "bad character" but if you don't qualify it you mean positive. I think I would define it as "the moral nature of an individual" but I don't want to create another item if it's redundant. I need it for main subject (P921) of a collection of essays. — Levana Taylor (talk) 02:35, 7 August 2020 (UTC)

There are character (Q366773) and moral character (Q12504525), found via a disambiguation page on enwiki. Ghouston (talk) 04:20, 7 August 2020 (UTC)
Geez, why didn't I see "moral character" when I looked through the list of search results? OK, thanks for doing my work for me — Levana Taylor (talk) 04:43, 7 August 2020 (UTC)

Are these two entries for the same person?

Hi, I think https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q784160 and https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q20243210 are the same person, but there are separate VIAF IDs. I am hesitant therefore to merge the two. The reason I would like to merge the two is because there is an article in English for Marie Schnür, which I think should have a redirect from Maria Marc. Also I would appreciate confirmation that this is the same person. Thank you! WomenArtistUpdates (talk) 18:29, 4 August 2020 (UTC)

@WomenArtistUpdates: No, they appear to be different people. According to the German Wikipedia (and supporting references) Marie was the first wife of Franz Marc. Maria was his second wife. They have different birth and death dates. From Hill To Shore (talk) 18:58, 4 August 2020 (UTC)
Thanks for clearing that up for me From Hill To Shore! It never occurred to me that Franz Marc had two wives with the same name born 10 years apart. I really appreciate your prompt reply. Best, WomenArtistUpdates (talk) 19:04, 4 August 2020 (UTC)
It is also confusing when someone marries a sibling of their spouse. At one time we had a list of them to remind people not to merge. I think we switched to adding "different from" in Wikidata so they do not get merged. I performed a "different from" as a reminder and added "first wife of ..." in the description field. --RAN (talk) 17:39, 7 August 2020 (UTC)
Is it possible to get a sparql listing those that have been married to someone, then married to another one, the one and second being siblings ? Bouzinac (talk) 19:46, 7 August 2020 (UTC)

person with two wikidata entries

There are 2 entries for Catherine Hobaiter, Q84078773 - researcher (ORCID 0000-0002-3893-0524) and Q28805305. The both are very sketchy with no references. I've now worked on a Wikipedia page about her (Cat_Hobaiter - used the name Cat since that is what she seems to use - sorry - adds confusion) and the sources I've found support the Q84078773 entry since the ORCID number links to her many publications. Is it appropriate to remove Q28805305 (if so - how?) and for me to edit Q84078773 to add the Wikipedia page? --MerielGJones (talk) 21:44, 4 August 2020 (UTC)

@MerielGJones: I did a bit of digging and confirmed they are both representing the Catherine Hobaiter at University of St Andrews. I've merged them into Catherine Hobaiter (Q28805305) and added some details. If she goes by multiple names, you can edit the Wikidata item to add an Alias at the top of the page. You can also link the Wikipedia page to the item. From Hill To Shore (talk) 22:42, 4 August 2020 (UTC)
@From Hill To Shore: Many thanks for doing this and finding more details. Also, thanks for the welcome to Wikidata - a resource that I do not really understand yet! I have added her Alias to the Catherine Hobaiter (Q28805305) page. However, another Wikidata page has been generated Catherine Hobaiter (Q98075059) by Pi bot and Edoderoobot and that was linked to the Cat Hobaiter Wikipedia page. I've managed to link the Wikipedia page to Catherine Hobaiter (Q28805305). However, how to deal with Catherine Hobaiter (Q98075059)? Can it be made a redirect, deleted ....? --MerielGJones (talk) 09:59, 5 August 2020 (UTC)
You will be finding more of these! We go through this with each addition of new data from large databases of humans. Easy ones done first and then we reach diminishing returns quickly. If you find that there are duplicates in the ORCID database itself, put both values in Wikidata. Later we search for two values in a person and report back to ORCID like we do for VIAF and LCCN values. --RAN (talk) 17:33, 7 August 2020 (UTC)

Similar items

Hello!

Q5855562 (counterfeit money) and Q5855562 (money counterfeiting) are very similar. I don't think any Wikipedia has the two seperate articles, but rather one or the other. Is this enough for a merger? I think that for example en:counterfeit money should be linked from sv:penningförfalskning.Jonteemil (talk) 20:30, 6 August 2020 (UTC)

P1659 "See also"

Is property related property (P1659) broken somehow? When I've tried to add a statement using it, it refuses to match any value I enter, so it cannot be used. It's been like this for the last week at least. I don't have a problem with any other properties! Thanks for any insight, DrThneed (talk) 00:11, 6 August 2020 (UTC)

  • It's a property to link properties together. It's not designed to link items together. ChristianKl ❪✉❫ 15:11, 6 August 2020 (UTC)
  • Gah it's right there in the description too. And I'm sure I knew that once! Thanks! But now I need a way to link related items. E.g. a place that has a house, the gardens of the house, and the instance of the house during it's use as a hospital, as three different items. Currently there is no way for anyone else to tell these things relate, and I Can't spot what the right property is to link them. Any suggestions?
    • You tell how items relate to each other by thinking about the relationship that the items have with each other and then choose the appropriate property. If you have an example of items where you can't find the appropriate properties, feel free to share the example. ChristianKl ❪✉❫ 09:43, 8 August 2020 (UTC)

Value Constraint for owner of (P1830)

I tried starting adding value constraints for owner of (P1830) and added pretty high level values. I'm unsure whether the constraint picks up the P279 inheritence right. There might also a bunch of other classes that should be added to the constraint. ChristianKl ❪✉❫ 11:46, 8 August 2020 (UTC)

Importing short descriptions from enwp

Hi all. The English Wikipedia has set up 'short descriptions', which replace the descriptions from Wikidata in searches etc. If you're not aware of the history, then you can find the discussions at en:Wikipedia:Short_description#History. They now have over 2 million local descriptions, and WMF might disable using the Wikidata descriptions there soon. This means that enwp has a separate set of descriptions that are maintained separately from the Wikidata descriptions, and will steadily get out of sync with the descriptions here (and their uses elsewhere) unless we do something about it.

As such, I've proposed a bot to import the descriptions at Wikidata:Requests for permissions/Bot/Pi bot 14. It has two options, either only importing descriptions where we don't already have one, or completely synchronising enwp and wikidata English descriptions. Technically, this is possible, and I contend that the descriptions are short enough to be ineligible for copyright. Should we do this? Thanks. Mike Peel (talk) 19:33, 3 August 2020 (UTC)

I think you mean en:Wikipedia:Short description#History. From Hill To Shore (talk) 19:43, 3 August 2020 (UTC)
Yes, link fixed above, thanks! Mike Peel (talk) 19:52, 3 August 2020 (UTC)
The matching discussion on enwp is at en:Wikipedia:Village_pump_(proposals)#Synchronising_short_descriptions_and_Wikidata_descriptions. Thanks. Mike Peel (talk) 21:52, 6 August 2020 (UTC)
I have some concerns with this proposed import.
  1. While I expect that in most cases the concept of a Wikidata item will perfectly align with the concept of the English Wikipedia article, this is not always the case. There are a lot of items where the topic discussed on the articles on the Wikipedia pages stray beyond the bounds of the Wikidata item (especially where you are linking to articles in multiple languages).
  2. Many Wikidata items link to multiple sites related to a topic; Wikipedias of multiple languages, Commons and WikiSource to name a few. Just as English Wikipedia users objected to using Wikidata descriptions because they didn't meet the specific requirements of their project, wouldn't importing the changed descriptions now cause problems at Wikidata due to not meeting the requirements of other projects? Just because English Wikipedia is the largest project, that doesn't make them right all the time or cause their output to be in the best interest of unrelated projects.
Being able to reuse data to reduce our workload is a positive but we need to be careful that we don't break what we have for the sake of short term convenience. If we can get more eyes on this and think through how to handle the resulting problems, then I would be able to support the proposal. From Hill To Shore (talk) 20:12, 3 August 2020 (UTC)
"This means that enwp has a separate set of descriptions that are maintained separately from the Wikidata descriptions, and will steadily get out of sync with the descriptions here (and their uses elsewhere) unless we do something about it." This stupidity is entirely of the en.Wikipedia community's making. Regardless, I'm not clear why we would overwrite Wikidata descriptions with those from en.Wikipedia. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 20:37, 3 August 2020 (UTC)
  • There is no need to keep WD desc and En.wp desc synced, there are reasons to keep this unsynced and separated. WD description describes an item, En.wp description describes an article – there are many situations in which there is no 1:1 equivalency between an item and an article. What's more, there are unfortunately many situations in which people do not know that and keep adding descriptions to WD that are in fact descriptions of an article in a particular language project. So   Oppose to any bot action that would overwrite existing data based on En.wp descriptions. Wostr (talk) 20:43, 3 August 2020 (UTC)
    • What about a third option, namely adding a NEW property for the short description written by Wikipedians who feel a need to overrule whatever short description may exist in Wikidata? A bot could automatically update any "Wikipedia short description(s)" when they are specified or changed. Wikidata could be programmed to not allow a user to change that in Wikidata and would tell anyone who tried where they need to go to actually change that. Then humans could easily review the different short descriptions and decide whether to revise one or the other, make them the same, or whatever. DavidMCEddy (talk) 20:50, 3 August 2020 (UTC)
Support, subject to reviewing any edge cases and specific issues. I've edited getting on for 10,000 English Wikipedia short descriptions, manually and semi-manually, and I'm confident that almost without exception those edits would have improved the bot-generated Wikidata text, had I been easily able to get them back here. The main issue with making a direct link is likely to be not 'breaking Wikidata' but the preference of enWP to start with a capital letter, which WD normally doesn't. But that is a technical side issue that could no doubt be solved. MichaelMaggs (talk) 20:57, 3 August 2020 (UTC)
  Oppose per Wostr there is no reason to be in sync with one particular external webpage -- but I would support a new property as described by DavidMCEddy (it seems his suggestion is merely to fetch the enWP description and display it per userScript or addon next to our existing ones similar to the Preview gadget). There should anyways soon be support for "bridges" and cross project editing so this could be an interesting testcase. --Hannes Röst (talk) 02:43, 4 August 2020 (UTC)
  Oppose also to the new property idea because articles are often about several concepts. You might not see this often if your interest is persons, but in molecular biology most articles contain several concepts. --SCIdude (talk) 07:18, 4 August 2020 (UTC) P.S. Except if you can put the new property on the sitelink...
If the Wikipedia article is about several concepts, it should not be linked to a Wikidata item about one concept. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 08:35, 4 August 2020 (UTC)
Practically impossible to achieve in some disciplines like chemistry/molecular biology. Wostr (talk) 10:26, 4 August 2020 (UTC)
Nonsense - but feel free to provide an example, if you disagree. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 12:41, 4 August 2020 (UTC)
Carbohydrates for example. Usually Wikipedia have one article about a specific carbohydrate (sometimes two: about D and L form) and it describes it as a 'chemical compound', we have a lot more items – several about 'group of isomers' (e.g. ribose (Q59817493), L-ribose (Q85553776), D-ribose (Q38176423)), several about 'group of stereoisomers' (e.g. L-ribopyranose (Q27120756), L-ribofuranose (Q27120751), D-ribopyranose (Q27120754), D-ribofuranose (Q179271)) and several about specific chemical compounds (aldehydo-L-ribose (Q27120760), aldehydo-D-ribose (Q27120759), α-L-ribopyranose (Q27120757), β-L-ribopyranose (Q27120758), α-L-ribofuranose (Q27120752), β-L-ribofuranose (Q27120753), α-D-ribopyranose (Q27120755), β-D-ribopyranose (Q27095107), α-D-ribofuranose (Q27104554), β-D-ribofuranose (Q27104584)). Description of Wikipedia article cannot be applied to the Wikidata item it is linked with. Second example: inositol trisphosphate (Q138145) – in Wikidata we should have different items for a neutral compound and for every anion (monoanion, dianion, trianion). This is not the case in Wikipedia, where the article is named as neutral compound, but most of the text is about an anionic form. Wostr (talk) 15:41, 4 August 2020 (UTC)
You have given an example where Wikipedia has one article, and Wikidata has many, more specific, items, and where the Wikipedia article is linked to one of those items, possibly incorrectly. You have not given an example where "[a] Wikipedia article is about several concepts [and so] it should not be linked to a Wikidata item about one concept" is "Practically impossible to achieve ". Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 16:45, 8 August 2020 (UTC)
  Strong oppose (emphasis added) This means that enwp has a separate set of descriptions that are maintained separately from the Wikidata descriptions, and will steadily get out of sync with the descriptions here (and their uses elsewhere) unless we do something about it. What? Why? It was the English Wikipedia community who unilaterally decided to fork the Wikidata descriptions; I firmly see this as their problem, not ours. They are free to reverse this (in my opinion, terrible) decision at any time and start using Wikidata descriptions again (and more importantly, contribute to them again, thereby benefiting many users outside of the walled garden of English Wikipedia short descriptions). Besides that, I disagree that the short descriptions are short enough to be ineligible for copyright. English Wikipedia is free to copy our descriptions, thanks to our CC0 license; but we cannot copy their descriptions, since I do believe they fall under CC BY-SA. --Lucas Werkmeister (talk) 09:45, 4 August 2020 (UTC)
Even allowing for the specific issues that have been mentioned, in the vast majority of cases a single well-written text will work both for Wikidata and the English Wikipedia, and can be released under CC0. So, at the very least I'd like to see a one-click or semi-manual feature so that editors working to improve descriptions here can push their edits through to Wikipedia without having to go there and duplicate the work; likewise, so that editors improving short descriptions at enWP can copy their improvements under CC0 over to Wikidata, without having to come here and duplicate the work. In both cases, of course, under user control. We should be striving to improve interoperability, and it is sad to read so many people blaming other projects (that works both ways). MichaelMaggs (talk) 11:25, 4 August 2020 (UTC)
  Oppose I find the claim that there are no copyright issues questionable. Both legally and socially for our relationship to EnWiki. There are also many cases where the goals for a good description in Wikipedia and Wikidata are different. ChristianKl ❪✉❫ 10:46, 4 August 2020 (UTC)
Don't really understand the copyright concern, as many existing Wikidata descriptions were created by bot using text automatically taken from the linked English Wikipedia article. If those existing bot-created descriptions are reasonably considered to be CC0 here (perhaps because they are short enough), why the new concern about future wordings? MichaelMaggs (talk) 11:35, 4 August 2020 (UTC)
I don't think it's acceptable to say that any major issue like this is "their problem", especially when we are talking about something like this. The English-language Wikipedia user community is too big and too important to ignore. DavidMCEddy (talk) 12:38, 4 August 2020 (UTC)
@DavidMCEddy: I think you meant to attach this to one of the other threads above (in the same section) as the topics you mention are in earlier threads. Here on Wikidata we provide a service to all Wikimedia projects and we need to consider the impacts of changes on all users. We don't ignore the input from other projects but we also need to be mindful of the effects. Swaying to the will of the largest project and not considering the potential harm to others would be very wrong. From Hill To Shore (talk) 15:50, 4 August 2020 (UTC)
I don't think that the whole out-of-sync/their problem/too big and to important to ignore is relevant here. The question is very simple - we have "free" dataset of high-quality manually curated 1-sentence description for ~2M of items. There will be few specific cases when en-wiki article is associated with wrong wikidata item, but any mass import has some percentage of errors. So   Strong support for option #1 if there are no copyright issues involved (IANAL, but I believe 1 sentence cannot be copyrightable, not sure about dataset/database rights) Ghuron (talk) 14:09, 4 August 2020 (UTC)
  Oppose We are supposed to be a collection of collaborative projects. But I have seen one more than one occasion en:WP people telling Commons that "this is the way we do it" and "this is the way it's always been done", however taxonomically and epistemologically suspect their way is. As said above, it's their problem. Rodhullandemu (talk) 16:25, 4 August 2020 (UTC)
If we do not have any description, and we can import one from en.wp - we should do it. I am not happy about en.wp community desigion either, but we must leave emotions aside. Carn (talk) 17:01, 4 August 2020 (UTC)
(ec)   Support for Wikidata items that do not have an English description yet,   Strong oppose overwriting existing descriptions. Yellowcard (talk) 17:03, 4 August 2020 (UTC)
Assuming copyright is not an issue, and the capitalizations can be fixed, I would be fine with importing descriptions to items that have no English description in wikidata. There may be some very minimal descriptions here that also would be fine to overwrite ("researcher", "organization", etc.) but in general I   Oppose overwriting of existing Wikidata descriptions, or any plan to keep them in "sync", there is no need for that. ArthurPSmith (talk) 18:16, 4 August 2020 (UTC)
  Oppose If WP:en has good reasons to not use WD data, the same reasons apply in WD when using short descriptions from WP:en. Then in my field of interest, I am cleaning items since sevral years now and I can confirm that in most WD items the concept is narrower that in WP articles. I strongly disagree to import short description from one WP even if an English label is missing because this can cause a discrepancy with the data in the item: concept description in WD should be defined from the data in the item and not from an interwiki which can be wrong or can evolve with time like in an WP article. Snipre (talk) 19:25, 4 August 2020 (UTC)

  DATA!: I've sampled 500 cases where short descriptions diverge b/w enwiki and wd. Here's a taste:

Short Description in enwiki and wikidata
Article enwiki wd len(enwiki) len(wd) diff(lenghts)
SUMS 15941 14868 1073
.223 Remington Firearms cartridge cartridge 18 9 9
1st Gnezdilovo Village in Kursk Oblast, Russia human settlement in Fatezhsky District, Kursk Oblast, Russia 31 60 -29
1,8-Cineole,NADPH:oxygen oxidoreductase index of enzymes associated with the same name Wikimedia disambiguation page 46 29 17
1 November 1954 Stadium (Batna) Multi-use stadium in Batna, Algeria building in Algeria 35 19 16
1 Police Plaza Office building in Manhattan, New York office building in Manhattan, USA 38 33 5

...and there are 495 more rows.

Subjectively, I would judge the WP descriptions to be be somewhat better than ours. They are quite obviously handcrafted in any cases, whereas WD descriptions are rather often careless collections of whatever facts the bot writing them has.
I've yet to encounter the term "human settlement" in real life, for example. But it's the most common term in descriptions of populated places. And while it was consciously decided to avoid the term "book" in favour of "literary work", it creates a cognitive barrier to understanding for a consumer of such data not already used to it. I did some blind rating with about a hundred items and came out at about 70:30, although it's hard to keep up the blinding because our descriptions follow patterns that soon become blindingly obvious. Matthias Winkelmann (talk) 05:19, 5 August 2020 (UTC)
The subset with "index of XYZ with the same name" could be automated? --SCIdude (talk) 08:07, 5 August 2020 (UTC)
  Neutral No problem with importing and overwriting, as long as (for the former) quality is assured and (for the latter) there is a human's oversight. --Matěj Suchánek (talk) 09:00, 6 August 2020 (UTC)
  Support syncing as a general concept. (In the spirit of syncing, this comment is mostly copied from my one at en-WP.) Wikidata descriptions and en-WP short descriptions are fundamentally the same thing: short descriptions. Are there occasional instances where they might properly diverge? Sure. But does that mean they should be totally split, leading to probably thousands of hours of duplicated (i.e. wasted) editor effort to create the same thing in two separate places? Absolutely not.
It's important to connect this to the bigger picture here. The success of the Wikimedia movement is fundamentally predicated on having enough people to do the work (that's the main reason Wikipedia deletes non-notable pages). Whenever we choose to fork, that literally doubles the amount of work to be done, which when you multiply by 6 million, comes out to a gargantuan cost in editor effort. Thus, preventing forks needs to be one of our highest priorities. Worse, once a fork has been made, re-integrating becomes harder and harder over time. I recognize that there are a lot of challenges to doing so here, both because of the initial reasons for the fork and because of the hurdles from the divergence so far, but at a fundamental level, that is the path we need to be on.
Regarding the specific proposals, importing en-WP descriptions where we have none would seem to make sense, although as some have pointed out above, there are challenges we'd need to overcome. I share the impression that where they diverge, en-WP descriptions tend to be better (due to the larger user base). I think what's likely to happen is that at some point (perhaps now, perhaps in a few years) the quality gulf will grow wide enough that we'll seek to adopt en-WP descriptions here. The question then becomes how to handle the situations where they are supposed to be different. Some further discussion is needed specifically on that question to define what exactly those circumstances are, and how best to handle them (probably through some technical modification, so that e.g. "for the verb use Q12345 instead" can be tacked on to a en-WP short description). {{u|Sdkb}} talk 07:34, 7 August 2020 (UTC)
English Wikipedia short descriptions are often different, but I disagree that they are in any way better on a large scale---exceptions in both directions may exist of course. It is pretty much personal flavor what one considers "better", but this is clearly not a basis on which a global sync should be enforced. ---MisterSynergy (talk) 08:26, 7 August 2020 (UTC)
The sample table Matthias Winkelmann compiled above is extremely compelling. Feel free to look through it yourself, but it paints a very clear picture to my eyes. I will very happily stand behind Military unit as a better description for 1st Marine Regiment (Q1778866) than alligator. {{u|Sdkb}} talk 08:36, 7 August 2020 (UTC)
Yeah I said that there are exceptions. So what? Apart from few exceptions, there is nothing which convinces me that the enwiki short descriptions are better in any way. Actually, they seem to be on average more detailed and a little longer, also maybe a little more individual---but there is nothing in them which Wikidata needs. Wikidata descriptions are disambiguators in the first place; they do not need to be detailed. ---MisterSynergy (talk) 08:47, 7 August 2020 (UTC)
They has to be detailed enough to clearly identify item among those, that are named similarly. And when you are automatically populating descriptions via quickstatement (the way we have >90% item descriptions) this goal cannot be seriously taken into consideration Ghuron (talk) 09:45, 7 August 2020 (UTC)
@MisterSynergy: The two million better-quality largely hand-crafted enW short descriptions aren't "a few exceptions": they would almost always work better for Wikidata that the bot-generated texts that Wikidata has at present (though of course not in absolutely every case). The many, many bot-generated texts such as "species of insect", "English writer" or "human habitation" are at such a high level that they hardly provide any useful information at all. And if all you want is disambiguation, there would even be no need for "species of insect" against any insect item that is already labelled with a unique binomial name. MichaelMaggs (talk) 12:25, 7 August 2020 (UTC)
The more standardized they are, the more useful they are. Mind that the way the descriptions are used in Enwiki (and other Wikipedias) is *not* the main purpose of Wikidata descriptions. They have just been used for this job as nothing else was available at the time this functionality was introduced to Wikipedias by WMF around five years ago. The Wikidata descriptions may not be optimal for Wikipedia, yet they are useful for Wikidata---particularly in the relatively standardized way we have them due to the prevalent automatic generation via bots. Any attempt to "sync" both descriptions is a bad idea for Wikidata. ---MisterSynergy (talk) 12:40, 7 August 2020 (UTC)

1,8-Cineole,NADPH:oxygen oxidoreductase (Q4545707)

Looked the third example above, is this really a disambiguation page? I think we already have Wikimedia set index article (Q15623926), so why not changing its P31 value? --Liuxinyu970226 (talk) 14:13, 5 August 2020 (UTC)

To be honest, I really see no real difference between en.wiki 'set index' and a normal 'disambiguation page'. I think in most Wikis there is no such distinction and I don't understand why there is no Wikimedia set index article (Q15623926)subclass of (P279)Wikimedia disambiguation page (Q4167410). Wostr (talk) 15:48, 5 August 2020 (UTC)
You may ask @Avatar6, Michiel1972, Infovarius: for why. --Liuxinyu970226 (talk) 05:43, 7 August 2020 (UTC)

Discrepancy statistics

I was now able to compile a fairly complete comparison of English Wikidata descriptions and English Wikipedia "short descriptions" (limited to non-redirects in namespace 0, around 6.13M article pages in enwiki, data as of today):

result relative share absolute article pages note
case-sensitive identical 07.5% 460k
case-insensitive identical 03.8% 235k does not include the case-sensitive set obviously
different 25.1% 1.54M 68.9% of cases where both a Wikidata and enwiki description exist
WD desc missing, EN short desc existing 03.5% 215k could potentially be imported, as Mike proposed
EN short desc missing, WD desc existing 40.0% 2.46M
description missing in WD and enwiki 20.1% 1.23M

I think it is safe to claim that from the very beginning, short descriptions and Wikidata descriptions have taken quite different paths. —MisterSynergy (talk) 23:46, 7 August 2020 (UTC)

Would anyone be interested in helping resolve some tricky interwiki links?

I've been working on sychronising the Commons category links on enwp with the Commons sitelinks here. Mostly it's going well (20k+ already resolved), but there are some particularly tricky items, would anyone be interested in helping with them? There needs to be a clear (and single) link between the item that sitelinks to enwp and the item that sitelinks to Commons, normally through topic's main category (P910)/category's main topic (P301) or list related to category (P1753)/category related to list (P1754). You can find the items via:

Thanks. Mike Peel (talk) 20:09, 7 August 2020 (UTC)

@Mike Peel: I'm working on something else right now, but wanted to at least cheer you on. This is very valuable work. --99of9 (talk) 08:00, 9 August 2020 (UTC)

Merging items

Hello, I'm trying to merge Q21506829 into Q19810348, but I'm having a bit of trouble. I read the instructions and tried the automatic method, but this didn't work. Hence I did it the manual way. I've moved over the data into Q19810348 and emptied Q21506829. However, I can't get Q21506829 to redirect to Q19810348. Both items are about the name Mika. Mikalagrand (talk) 10:19, 9 August 2020 (UTC)

Possibly because they are linked to each other. But one seems to be for use as a given name, and the other a surname. Ghouston (talk) 10:26, 9 August 2020 (UTC)
The articles linked to the items cover all uses of the name Mika; given name, nickname and surname. Mikalagrand (talk) 11:01, 9 August 2020 (UTC)
Do not merge family name with given name. --HarryNº2 (talk) 11:03, 9 August 2020 (UTC)
Hello HarryNº2 (talk), before you undo everything. Why do you think Q21506829 shouldn't be merged into Q19810348? I don't think there is any need for seperate items and articles for given names and surnames. If you look at the linked articles, they cover every use of the name Mika. Mikalagrand (talk) 11:15, 9 August 2020 (UTC)
Is everything right, the interwikilinks linked now here: Mika (Q1158495). For more information please look here: Wikidata:WikiProject_Names#Sample_items. There you can also ask your questions if something is incomprehensible. Greetings, HarryNº2 (talk) 11:29, 9 August 2020 (UTC)
Okay so if I understand correctly: there are supposed to be multiple items for a name. Though, since the articles cover all uses (given name, nickname, family name) they are all linked at one of these items. I understand why you would have seperate items for names of people and disambiguation articles, but not why you would have a seperate item for given name, nickname and family name. I feel like this increases the chance of error (ie new language articles not being linked at the correct item), for no obvious advantage. Greetings, Mikalagrand (talk) 11:48, 9 August 2020 (UTC)
Please discuss this here: Wikidata talk:WikiProject Names. --HarryNº2 (talk) 11:55, 9 August 2020 (UTC)
@Mikalagrand: Wikipedia articles aren't central to Wikidata items. Wikidata generally distinguishes more different entities. ChristianKl ❪✉❫ 18:53, 9 August 2020 (UTC)

.jpg --> .png

Would somebody kindly change the .jpg abomination currently in Q3269011 to c:File:ARToolKit logo.png? --Palosirkka (talk) 18:56, 9 August 2020 (UTC)

  Done, thank you.

Connections between district and appellate courts?

Are there Wikidata properties to relate district and appellate courts? If yes what are they?

For example, appeals from United States District Court for the District of Kansas (Q7889773) go to United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit (Q286918), but I don't see that information in either of these Wikidata items. That information is in their corresponding Wikipedia articles. Might it also be good and appropriate to have it in their Wikidata items as well?

I'm not an attorney. In this particular case, appeals from a "District" court go to a "Circuit court of appeals". I don't know technically how cases get to the US Supreme Court. I'm guessing that they would be appealed from a Circuit court of appeals, but I don't know that. And appeals systems in other countries are doubtless different from the US, and I don't know how that works.

I suppose we could say that

However, neither of these feel quite right to me. Are there properties for this? If not, should they be created?

What do you think?

Thanks, DavidMCEddy (talk) 03:20, 9 August 2020 (UTC)

@DavidMCEddy: I agree that it would be useful to have standard way to link a lower court to its superior/appellate court. Currently this seems to be done in a variety of different ways, none of which are ideal: 
SELECT ?p ?pLabel (COUNT(*) AS ?count) 
WHERE {
  ?s ?pd ?o .
  ?p wikibase:directClaim ?pd .
  ?s wdt:P31/wdt:P279* wd:Q41487 .
  ?o wdt:P31/wdt:P279* wd:Q4959031 .
  SERVICE wikibase:label { bd:serviceParam wikibase:language "[AUTO_LANGUAGE],en". }
} 
GROUP BY ?p ?pLabel 
ORDER BY DESC(?count)
Try it!
Of those next higher rank (P3730) seems closest for this type of relation, even though not very widely used here yet. Do you think this adequately captures the relationship? I agree that part of (P361) seems wrong, though I can see why people would gravitate to using it in the absence of an obviously better property. --Oravrattas (talk) 06:05, 10 August 2020 (UTC)

Strategy transition design draft

I have been working for more than a month in the Strategy transition design group - a body of about 20 people who were working together to establish the principles to be used to design the events to implement the strategy recommendations. (Do not even ask me how I ended up to be part of the group). Anyway, now we have produced the draft: meta:Strategy/Wikimedia movement/2018-20/Transition/Events Outline/Draft. It is written for the whole movement, not just for the projects, and certainly not just for Wikidata, so the language from our perspective can look a bit bureaucratic, and the text a bit (or sometimes too) unspecific. However, I would encourage all the users interested in the relation between projects and WMF, and generally in the development of the Wikimedia movement, to have a look, and, specifically, to look at whether the communities (in the language of the document, online communities) will be involved enough, how they will be involved, and how this involvement can be stimulated and improved. Whereas obviously there were many people involved in the creation of the draft, and these people have very different interests, the importance of involving the projects has been recognized by everybody as a crucial issue. What we are trying to avoid is the (unfortunately, common) situation when the projects are completely decoupled from the process, the process runs on, and at some point some decision taken without even thinking about the projects comes out of the blue and gets a (predictable) very negative reaction.

The draft has been posted on Thursday 6 August and will be open for comments until 20 August (my apologies for posting here only now, I was on holidays this week and just returned home). You are welcome to leave the comments on the talk page of the draft on Meta (where it will be directly read by the WMF people running the process), or here. I will be watching both pages anyway, and will somehow make sure that useful comments do not get lost. I can probably clarify things if needed. There is also some discussion ongoing on the English Wikipedia, w:en:Wikipedia:Village pump (WMF)#Strategy transition design draft, which might (or might not) clarify some issues.

For the full disclosure, whereas the process has been run by the WMF, I was never paid by the WMF, nor ever been a member of any affiliate. I participate in the group solely in my volunteer capacity.--Ymblanter (talk) 08:48, 10 August 2020 (UTC)

Launching Wikiproject tabular data

Commons has a namespace dedicated to data stored in a Json like format. While they do not seem to offer anything Wikibase cannot do at all, they offer an attractive alternative in some cases, notably because they are:

  • more lightweight
  • more flexible in terms of license (supportd CC-by and CC-by-sa).

Demographical time series are a clear example of data we could never really get to upload to Wikidata and would be suited for tabular data. We are currently planning to transfer data about French municipalities from frwiki Lua modules to Commons' tabular data.

Those data would be much more usable if they we linked from Wikidata, and if they were standardized, probably using Wikidata qids as semantic identifiers.

I have created a stubbish Wikidata:WikiProject Tabular data. Anyone willing to help ? --Zolo (talk) 06:49, 10 August 2020 (UTC)

In my opinion the major flaw of tabular data is lacking a way to denote how should the data be interpreted.--GZWDer (talk) 06:59, 10 August 2020 (UTC)
We could build a bridge by for example indicate in a dataset item the mapping between a column of the tabular data the corresponding property if possible, provide a way to map the item-corresponding values to Wikidata items (an identifier property ?) — for example if a column contains INSEE municipality code (P374)   in a dataset related to france we have a natural way to find the corresponding items). If a group of column can be translated into a statement we could specify in the metadata (subject item column, or subject item of the whole dataset if relevant, property for the main value, main value column, qualifiers column …)
But it might be more complex, involve mapping values with maths expressions or queries, properties that will be rejected on Wikidata and so on … Maybe this would need to refer to properties outside of Wikidata in the web of data world …
Maybe we could include datas needed to configure a tool like openrefine to do the reconciliation easily (ideally and ultimately, you load an item dataset into openrefine and it loads the datas, starts the reconciliation work …) author  TomT0m / talk page 09:05, 10 August 2020 (UTC)
My idea was to start with a dataset for French municipalites that would use properties ids in field names and Qids in values when applicable. See c:Data:Population FR 01001 L'Abergement-Clémenciat.tab or the similar c:Data:Taipei Beitou District Population.tab by user:S-1-5-7. We definitely need to agree on standared data structures so that the data can be used as broadly as possible, starting at Wikipedias. -Zolo (talk) 11:05, 10 August 2020 (UTC)

Certain countries have P31s in the wiki pages but not in query result

I'm trying to find a list of all countries contained within countries but certain countries, namely England (Q21) and Scotland (Q22), seem to be missing all but one instance of (P31)'s, most critically for me country (Q6256). This isn't the case however for Wales (Q25). Does anyone know what's causing this?

Compare the result of the following query to the page for England (Q21). 

SELECT DISTINCT ?p31 ?p31Label
WHERE
{
  wd:Q21 wdt:P31 ?p31 .
  SERVICE wikibase:label {
    bd:serviceParam wikibase:language "en" .
  }
}
Try it!

Cdo256 (talk) 09:11, 10 August 2020 (UTC)

@Cdo56: This is because these values have "preferred" rank - the "wdt:" format of the query says "give me the best answers", which is all the entries of preferred rank, and if there aren't any, all the entries of normal rank. If you look on England (Q21), you'll see that there's a different icon just to the left of the "constituent country" entry, with the top arrow highlighted, to indicate that it's preferred.
To get all values, you can use this syntax:
SELECT DISTINCT ?p31 ?p31Label
WHERE
{
  wd:Q21 p:P31 ?statement . ?statement ps:P31 ?p31 .
  SERVICE wikibase:label {
    bd:serviceParam wikibase:language "en" .
  }
}
Try it!
You'll see that it now returns four answers - preferred plus the three normal. Andrew Gray (talk) 09:39, 10 August 2020 (UTC)
Ah that makes sense. Thank you! --Cdo256 (talk) 09:46, 10 August 2020 (UTC)

Range of serie numbers

I created Q98207872. I would like to add the vehicle number range 501-528, mentioned in fr:Matériel roulant de l'ELRT. How can I do this?Smiley.toerist (talk) 10:33, 10 August 2020 (UTC)

Q19423984

At William Scudder Stryker (Q19423984) there are two ways to format "described by" for the same source, which should we harmonize on? --RAN (talk) 13:26, 10 August 2020 (UTC)

Add an additional qualifier, statement is subject of (P805) = Appletons' Cyclopædia of American Biography/Stryker, William Scudder (Q89921249), to the statement described by source (P1343) = Appletons' Cyclopædia of American Biography (Q12912667).
Also, on Appletons' Cyclopædia of American Biography/Stryker, William Scudder (Q89921249) add main subject (P921) = William Scudder Stryker (Q19423984). Jheald (talk) 15:05, 10 August 2020 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #428

 
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Events
    • Past: Wikibase Live Session - August 2020. This session had a few people present on some of their work with modeling GLAM data in Wikibase or Wikidata. (replay)
    • Upcoming: Next Linked Data for Libraries LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call: Daniel Mietchen and Lane Rasberry about Scholia, a project to present bibliographic information and scholarly profiles of authors and institutions, 11 August. [Agenda]
    • Upcoming: Online Wikidata editathon in Swedish #25, August 16
  • Development
    • finalized designs for the query builder to start coding at the beginning of September
    • wrapping up the initial work on the design system so that we can start using the first pieces of it in the query builder development
    • working on properly linking redirects in recent changes, watchlist and co (phabricator:T255387)
    • addressed remaining security review comments about the Wikidata Bridge so that we can deploy it finally on the first Wikipedia
    • fixed a bug where string values had the wrong length limit (phabricator:T259440)
    • finishing the work of untangling Wikibase Client and Wikibase Repository extensions to make development easier

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here. If you want to help, you can also have a look at the tasks needing a volunteer.

Do islands need to have separate items for its administrative territory? (2)

I am sorry I have not replied to the discussion before (now archived here) because of irl problems. I still want to ask about the problem I mentioned there. Say, I want to know articles about regencies in Indonesia in the Javanese Wikipedia and the query is using instance of (P31) for regency of Indonesia (Q3191695). There are regencies in Indonesia which comprises a whole island group such as Selayar Isls. In managing this using an approach like calorie (Q87260855) would make problems. The supposed combined item for Selayar Isls. then wouldn't come up in the query because it would be a Wikipedia article covering multiple topics (Q21484471), not a Q3191695. RXerself (talk) 15:38, 2 August 2020 (UTC)

I'm quite sure you want at least two items for an island. One for the administrative unit, one for the island, both will have a different P31. And some islands might possibly have more administrations (many countries have like provinces/municipalities/neighbourhoods and a small island might be all three). Edoderoo (talk) 18:25, 2 August 2020 (UTC)
+1 to Edoderoo. Obviously, not every island is an administrative unit, but when they are that merits two separate items, linked with coextensive with (P3403). - Jmabel (talk) 18:31, 2 August 2020 (UTC)
Technically you can create a page "X (island)" which redirects to article "X", and have an item about the island connected to that redirect. (Or the other way around.) I am not sure everybody here likes that, but I have found it very useful. Islands and administrative entities often have very different founding dates. Most island here have a history back to the last ice age, while most administrive territories only have a history of decades. 62 etc (talk) 18:42, 2 August 2020 (UTC)
Yes I know about the different area and different founding dates from the last thread. I want to repeat that the islands I am referring to here is the ones which also exist as its own individual administrative unit with the exactly same border and area. There are Wikipedias which treat the two as separate subjects and thus have separate articles. I understand that having two separate items would accomodate such cases. Having only one item would also create a problem when querying those articles. The question I am asking now is the vise versa problem which arises when we have two items. RXerself (talk) 16:13, 3 August 2020 (UTC)
I have just came to think about it again, connecting it to redirect maybe reasonable and there have been an RfC about it before but I'm not sure that it has been a consensus? I like the sound of it but I think that the list of Wikipedia articles returned from the query would contain redirect pages (and I'm not sure whether it's sound from the point of view of the data consumer). RXerself (talk) 07:29, 9 August 2020 (UTC)
Just tried one, I realized that we can't use redirect pages for Wikipedia links in Wikidata. Welp. RXerself (talk) 07:07, 10 August 2020 (UTC)
@RXerself: It's technically possible to do so, but it is deliberately made difficult. I think you have to temporarily change the page away from being a redirect, link it, and change it back. There definitely are some done like this on purpose, and I gather that there is no hard-and-fast rule against the practice. My own feeling is that if it is allowed, it shouldn't be so tricky to do and there should be a more overt override, and if it isn't allowed it shouldn't be OK to override this way, but it is as it is. - Jmabel (talk) 15:33, 10 August 2020 (UTC)
Please note that there are two separate questions here:
  1. Should there be separate entities for geographical-island and island-as-administrative-division? (Edoderoo and Jmabel just above, and I'm getting the impression general current consensus, all say "yes".)
  2. How do you backlink these entities to the Wikipedias, especially if a single Wikipedia article covers both the geographical and the administrative entities, and especially if different Wikipedias partition things differently? To handle this, do we need a third, pseudo entity for either-the-geographical-or-the-administrative-island-but-we're-not-sure? (That's where the example of calorie (Q87260855) comes in, and although I'm the one who brought it up -- and who created Q87260855 in the first place! -- it does indeed cause problems and I don't think I like it in the case of islands.)
This is the Bonnie and Clyde problem on steroids, and it's a thorny one. —Scs (talk) 15:02, 3 August 2020 (UTC)
I think the issue goes much further than this. This issue occurs not just for islands but actually most political entities such as towns, cities, municipalities (eg Kesswil (Q69413) and Kesswil (Q22388447)) where the human settlement at that place is co-existing with the political entity at that place and there is only one Wikipedia article (in most languages). This causes the same issue with geonames for example making the distinction ([3] and [4]). Currently it is basically ignored for the most part but using the "Bonny and Clyde" approach would really mean that linking Wikipedia articles to these places becomes very difficult (how will you find the correct Wikipedia article for a town for example)? I think an easier solution for this problem would actually be to only have 2 articles: main article about the community itself and this is then located in the administrative territorial entity (P131) using the current political entity. This will work for simple cases (one community, one administrative unit). What do people think?--Hannes Röst (talk) 15:20, 3 August 2020 (UTC)
If it's for two administrative units on different levels but having the same name and boundary, yes I think that it is a sufficient approach. RXerself (talk) 16:56, 3 August 2020 (UTC)
Not quite, this would *not* be for two admin units but for two entities, one a settlement/town/city (the humans living there and their houses etc) and one an administrative unit. The idea would be to use Kesswil (Q69413)located in the administrative territorial entity (P131)Kesswil (Q22388447), similar to how one would use (island name) -> located in the administrative territorial entity (P131) -> Island administrative unit if the two are exactly overlapping (leading to a lot of statements "X P131 X" where X is both the name of the town/island/city and the admin unit). --Hannes Röst (talk) 18:45, 3 August 2020 (UTC)
Yeah, I think I have ever used it before on islands that are wholly in an administrative unit (like Boji Island (Q24824681)). Both an island and administrative unit if they are occupying the same boundary can be connected using that and located in/on physical feature (P706). RXerself (talk) 07:29, 9 August 2020 (UTC)

Error merging two items

Hi! I'm trying to merge this entity: Q24677919 (2016) with Q158822 (2012). However, I'm experiencing an error as one (SV) of the two projects connected currently has two separate pages for that entity (when they're the same entity). I'm not sure if this is the right channel to ping this, but does anybody have recommendations on how to resolve this? Thanks! — Infogapp1 (talk) 11:42, 10 August 2020 (UTC)

Every wikipage has it's own wikidata entry. When one language version has two pages, it has two wikidata items as well. If they are truely the same, then the pages should be merged/redirected on sv-wiki first. Edoderoo (talk) 12:12, 10 August 2020 (UTC)
@Edoderoo: I reached out to one of the admins in the SV project. Thanks! — Infogapp1 (talk) 19:55, 10 August 2020 (UTC)
Not the same - Pontcysyllte Aqueduct and Canal (Q24677919) is part of Llangollen Canal (Q1545923), and includes Pontcysyllte Aqueduct (Q158822) and Chirk Aqueduct (Q5101943). Peter James (talk) 22:24, 10 August 2020 (UTC)

Model identifiers of products

What's the best way to represent specific model identifiers of a product? MacBook Pro 16-inch (Q78982844) is an example of an item where it would be useful. That line of MacBook Pros has (for now) a single model with identifiers "MacBookPro16,1" and "A2141". It has four sub-models with these model designations: "MVVJ2LL/A", "MVVK2LL/A", "MVVL2LL/A", "MVVM2LL/A". Cf en:MacBook Pro#Technical specifications 5. Ehn (talk) 15:51, 6 August 2020 (UTC)

If the item is supposed to represent all these variants, add them as aliases I guess. Ghouston (talk) 04:34, 7 August 2020 (UTC)
What is the right level for Wikidata? Should there be one item for each variant or one for all of them? Or both? If one item should cover all the variants, it should arguably be an instance of model series (Q811701) rather than computer model (Q55990535). But that creates issues with adding specification, as a lot of the properties in Wikidata property for items about computer hardware (Q22969262) don't like being added to instances of model series (Q811701). Ehn (talk) 09:20, 8 August 2020 (UTC)
I don't really know. Generally you need separate Wikidata items for each device where you want to record different properties. Nested "series" are difficult, e.g., Samsung SM-G975F is one of the Samsung Galaxy S10+ models, which is one of the Samsung Galaxy S10 variants, which is in the Samsung Galaxy S series of phones which are Samsung Galaxy phones, and "Galaxy" is also a brand that includes some devices like tablets and a few cameras. Ghouston (talk) 13:03, 8 August 2020 (UTC)
@Ghouston: What is the problem with the (deeply) nested series in your Galaxy example? It seems like we would want to represent that hierarchy if it exists in reality. Ehn (talk) 17:45, 8 August 2020 (UTC)
Yeah, I guess you are right, it's just picking the best way to represent it in Wikidata. I suppose we can just have Samsung Galaxy S10+ (Q66688566) part of the series (P179) Samsung Galaxy S10 (Q60021939) and Samsung Galaxy S10 (Q60021939) part of the series (P179) Samsung Galaxy S series (Q73389) and Samsung Galaxy S series (Q73389) part of the series (P179) Samsung Galaxy (Q493064), although at the bottom of the pile, we aren't really sure what's a "model" and what's a "model series", and at the top of the pile, Samsung Galaxy (Q493064) is really just a brand, not a series of products, since phones/tablets/cameras don't form a single series. Ghouston (talk) 00:48, 9 August 2020 (UTC)

Galaxy is arguably still a model series (of handheld devices, say) as well as a brand.

In iPhone land, you would then have something like iPhone 11 Pro part of iPhone 11 Pro (series) (since it also contains iPhone 11 Pro Max) part of iPhone (series), which is perhaps not what people expect, but correct. Assuming this is the best way to represent reality, on what level should specifications go?

For example, the iPhone 11 Pro and iPhone 11 Pro Max use the same CPU but have different screen sizes. Should the CPU only be specified on the iPhone 11 Pro (series) level or on each instance thereof? Only stating common specs on the series level reduces redundancy, saves time (for the data recorder), reduces the risk of inaccurate and inconsistent data (in case an error was found and fixed in one place but not the others). Stating common specs on each device makes the data easier to consume. An extreme example, if you go for making common claims only at the highest level, Apple should only be stated as the developer on the iPhone (series) level. That is probably not what people expect.

What's the best practice for handling "inheritance" in Wikidata? Ehn (talk) 08:12, 10 August 2020 (UTC)

Basically Wikidata doesn't have any inheritance. The only data the can be queried on a given item is what's actually on the item, and any inference from a parent class has to be done by the user. They'd have to decide themselves which properties on the parent class are relevant and which are not. Ghouston (talk) 08:19, 10 August 2020 (UTC)
Should this be read as "Wikidata doesn't currently have any inheritance" or "Wikidata is intentionally designed to not have any inheritance"? Ie, should we put all relevant claims on each item regardless of redundancy or hold off for infrastructure support? If the former, it seems anyone who would want to work on getting good coverage for even rather narrow product categories into Wikidata would have to build quite a bit of supportive user-side automation so as not to die of boredom (and make frequent mistakes). Ehn (talk) 08:29, 10 August 2020 (UTC)
Intentionally so. See Wikidata:Item classification --Oravrattas (talk) 12:52, 10 August 2020 (UTC)

@Oravrattas: Thanks for the pointer! That page says:

The implications of this model of classification is that while statements about a class are not inherited by its instances and subclasses, properties that are valid for a given class (see Wikidata:Domain and Wikidata:Range) are also automatically valid for all subclasses and instances of that class.

Is there a best practice for what properties should go on a class item vs its subclasses/instances? Presumably not everything should be duplicated, nor should everything be pushed to the leaves alone, as that would leave us with a hierarchy of mostly empty, non-descriptive classes and extremely detailed leaf nodes. Ehn (talk) 04:28, 11 August 2020 (UTC)

  • "MVVJ2LL/A", "MVVK2LL/A", "MVVL2LL/A", "MVVM2LL/A" all has part(s) (P527) "A2141" because they're different "retail packages" that contain different chargers, etc but the same laptop: "A2141". --Dhx1 (talk) 13:50, 7 August 2020 (UTC)
    This is incorrect. They represent different colors, CPUs, storage, probably other things. I guess Apple has yet another identifier (SKU?) for the retail packaging variants you mention. Ehn (talk) 09:23, 8 August 2020 (UTC)
    @Ehn: What causes the "M code" to change? Optional memory expansion for MacBooks, different colour, different country charger included in the box? everymac.com has some additional information that may assist. A retail box including charger will also likely have Global Trade Item Number (P3962) as a unique identifier. --Dhx1 (talk) 10:43, 8 August 2020 (UTC)

    @Dhx1: The "M codes" represent base models/configurations within a product generation. EveryMac.com refers to these strings as order numbers, Wikipedia as model numbers, whereas it seems Apple uses the term item number, at least on its receipts. For example, within the model sub-series that Wikipedia refers to as "fifth-generation MacBook Pro models", in late 2019, Apple launched a 16-inch version, which received the model identifier "MacBookPro16,1", model number "A2141" and EMC "3347". This version comes in four base models (with item numbers "MVVJ2LL/A", "MVVK2LL/A", "MVVL2LL/A", "MVVM2LL/A"), which differ in CPU and storage (2.6 GHz 6-core Intel Core i7 and 512 GB or 2.3 GHz 8-core Intel Core i9 and 1 TB) and color ("Silver" or "Space Gray").

    To further complicate matters, these base configurations can be customized and built to order, in which case the delivered laptop would, if I understand correctly, not have one of these four order numbers. It would still have the same model identifier, model number, and EMC. Given that, representing every order number may be too fine-grained, and won't include every user-configurable option anyway. Perhaps model identifier is the right level. Ehn (talk) 17:42, 8 August 2020 (UTC)

    We have the same thing with vehicles, which often come in numerous variations for a single "model", such as engine, body type and colour, and CPUs, which sometimes have a large range differing in clock speed, cache size, fabrication technique etc. Ghouston (talk) 00:54, 9 August 2020 (UTC)

Migrate sports team colors from enwiki

I've started a discussion on English Wikipedia about migrating some sports team color data to Wikidata (it's currently stored in a local Lua module on enwiki): en:Module talk:College color#Proposal: Migrate to Wikidata. –IagoQnsi (talk) 07:38, 11 August 2020 (UTC)

Q96410061

Will a bot eventually fill in the data for Tom Gallagher (Q96410061), or do I need to do it by hand? --RAN (talk) 21:36, 9 August 2020 (UTC)

Looks like it is now filled. --RAN (talk) 13:19, 11 August 2020 (UTC)

property that may violate privacy (Q44601380)

To what degree should this item be used on identifiers representing social media accounts? --Trade (talk) 07:21, 11 August 2020 (UTC)

probably not at all if the social media account is public. --Hannes Röst (talk) 16:20, 11 August 2020 (UTC)

Help:Dataset sizing

A series of queries .. work in progress. --- Jura 12:06, 12 August 2020 (UTC)

Q11705477

Hello,

I just made some edits to Q11705477 and I would like to double check if the edits are set in there correctly before I do the 71 others. I used the help articles and an example, however better to be sure then need to clean up 72 articles if it goes wrong.

I didn't find a helpdesk like page, so I hope my post here is correctly places. Thanks! Ziminiar (talk) 17:37, 12 August 2020 (UTC)

Treaty website v. content?

Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (Q28130514) documents the w:Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, including linking to the Wikipedia article on it AND identifying all the countries that have signed and ratified it. In that Wikipedia article, the website for the treaty is referenced as {{Cite web |url=https://treaties.un.org/Pages/ViewDetails.aspx?src=TREATY&mtdsg_no=XXVI-9&chapter=26&clang=_en |title=Chapter XXVI: Disarmament – No. 9 Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons |publisher=United Nations Treaty Collection |date=2019-07-06 |accessdate=2017-09-21}}.

Is there any reason I should NOT create a separate Wikidata item with the same name to cite that webpage directly?

Doing so should make it easier to cite it elsewhere while also making it easier to maintain, e.g., against w:link rot.

Thanks, DavidMCEddy (talk) 19:50, 9 August 2020 (UTC)


DarTar (talk) 08:28, 19 May 2018 (UTC) Daniel Mietchen (talk) 11:24, 19 May 2018 (UTC) Maxlath (talk) 11:33, 19 May 2018 (UTC) Jumtist (talk) 11:34, 19 May 2018 (UTC) Pintoch (talk) 11:40, 19 May 2018 (UTC) JakobVoss (talk) 11:44, 19 May 2018 (UTC) PKM (talk) 20:12, 19 May 2018 (UTC) ArthurPSmith (talk) 13:47, 22 May 2018 (UTC) Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits Vladimir Alexiev (talk) 12:43, 27 November 2018 (UTC) Ivanhercaz   (Talk) 11:55, 3 February 2019 (UTC) Epìdosis 11:23, 15 April 2019 (UTC) Tris T7 TT me Kpjas (talk) 07:45, 2 March 2021 (UTC)

  Notified participants of WikiProject Wikipedia Sources Kindly requesting some clarification with this topic please. Wallacegromit1 (talk) 20:32, 10 August 2020 (UTC)

I've created many Wikidata items for documents and referenced them using w:Template:Cite Q.
A few days ago when I searched for "Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons", I found there was already a Wikidata item with that title but referring to the treaty itself, not the document. I hadn't noticed a Wikidata item like that before, so I asked two of the people maintaining that Wikidata item if they saw any problem with creating another Wikidata item with the same title that referred to the document. User:Wallacegromit1 asked me to repost here.
To me this seems crudely analogous to the discussion above re., "Do islands need to have separate items for its administrative territory? (2)". One response there is that, "you want at least two items for an island. One for the administrative unit, one for the island, both will have a different P31."
??? Thanks, DavidMCEddy (talk) 22:39, 10 August 2020 (UTC)

The Source MetaData WikiProject does not exist. Please correct the name. Kindly requesting some clarification with this topic please. Thanks for the patience @DavidMCEddy: Wallacegromit1 (talk) 03:59, 13 August 2020 (UTC)

  • There is no best practice established. Do whatever you like. If you wish, write some documentation and propose it as a best practice. Probably the most developed similar discourse is how many Wikidata items to make for a book. Books exist as a concept of the work itself, then also as texts with different content in various editions and translations, then possibly also as particular unique printed copies of the book. I think in this case you are talking about the concept of the treaty as a work, then also as a text source. Do anything you wish, except implementing what you do at scale. Eventually we need a collection of cases to set a guideline. Blue Rasberry (talk) 13:58, 13 August 2020 (UTC)

Occupations and their Discontents

I am trying to wrap my head around the reasoning behind various odd things being defined as occupation (Q12737077), from 8 (Q340894) (and number 8 (Q2270369)) to the more relevant criminal (Q2159907) and serial killer (Q484188). There is no reason why these and should be occupations, and the talk pages are full of complaints and lacking in substantive replies. Yet the practice persists and any change is, sooner or later, reverted.

My understanding of the term is reflected in the dictionaries' definitions. Ignoring military occupations as another, entirely different concept, here are the relevant entries from the people who invented overthinking the English language: 

(1) a person’s job: He listed his occupation on the form as "teacher."
Cambridge Dictionary

The primary sense of occupation here is synonymous with job or vocation. And while there is something like a "career criminal", that aspect makes up a rather small part of the meaning of the generic "criminal". instance of (P31) requires, with few exceptions, the instances to make up a subset of the class. For "criminal" there is some small overlap at best. Murder is financially motived in only a fraction of cases, and serial murderers almost never are. 

(2) An occupation is also a regular activity:
Sailing was his favorite weekend occupation.
Cambridge Dictionary

It is true that occupation isn't always financially motivated. But this sense cannot be equated with, basically, "anything anyone does", or we would need to add "cook" and "parent" to a whole lot of items, as those are activities many people spent far more time on than Ronald DeFeo Jr. (Q933143) ever did on murder. It is used only for regular activity, and most often activities undertaken for leisure. It gets close to hobby, but with a bit more focus on the act of engaging in something rather than the field itself. The related term "to occupy oneself" also hints at a sort of relaxed wastefulness (of time) here.

Again, none of the items get even close to the meaning of the word. It is quite telling that none of these items have categories at either enwiki or dewiki supporting such a claim. My understanding of other languages is limited, but I have not seen any indication that this is all caused by some Babylonian miscommunication, either.

Examining the languages, we find @Jeblad: bitterly complaining here, and mentions that this issue is a major problem for nowiki. @Neo-Jay: gives the most substantive defense for the practice I found: it "refers to an activity on which time is spent or something that somebody does in his/her free time, not just the job by which somebody earns a living", they say. This aligns with the second dictionary definition, above. I am not a native speaker and my intuition may be off, but I just don't see how that definition, or any other, naturally fits with Dylann Roof (Q20203314)'s decision on how to spent his free time on the afternoon of June 17, 2015. Neo-Jay continues: "Many items have the statement: "occupation: serial killer". Changing "serial killer" from "occupation" to "human activity" caused lots of errors, which makes the argument entirely self-contained. Those statements are obviously just as wrong, and would need to be changed as in, for example, Ronald DeFeo Jr. (Q933143)convicted of (P1399)murder (Q132821).

I believe this is French surprise seeing conspiracy theorist (Q19831149) used as occupation. That case is actually slightly more plausible. Yet I would agree with @Korg:, as it seems to me that fearing alien abductions is not (necessarily) an activity, but closer to a believe system. Although it's probably the aliens making me think that.

Back to actual murderers, here is the same issue being raised by @קיפודנחש:, who I assume is a speaker of Hebrew. They also assert to have surveyed other languages and repeatedly finding this pattern. @Urjanhai: speaks Finnish, I believe, and [add the Oxford Dictionary's] definition to my Cambridge version from above.

Reading these, and the replies, I get the sense that everyone thinks some other language wants or needs this. If so, I haven't found it.

The problem is larger than just murder. Running this query will give you a list of 10,000 "occupations", the majority of which would get you more strange look than serial killer. Among them are "METROPOLIS" -Sicherungsstück Nr. 1: Negative of the restored and reconstructed version 2001 (Q28028253) (a copy of a movie), Joseph Prielozny (Q66084615) (purveyor of "Christian hip hop" and also, apparently, something that can be done), a mover (Q27105472) (correct) and a Shaker (the religion). Most prominent, however, is the endless list of sports positions, whose categorisation as occupations is also tenuous, which brings me to the end (Q5375780).

--Matthias Winkelmann (talk) 17:47, 9 August 2020 (UTC)

Please adhere to good faith! (“we find @Jeblad: bitterly complaining here”) Jeblad (talk) 10:14, 13 August 2020 (UTC)
Clearly the issue is that if you're trying to describe a human (Q5), after you fill in their name, birthdate and country, the next thing you want to add is what they're known for doing.
In the case of Dylann Roof (Q20203314), nobody knows or cares that he had recently been paid as landscaper (Q43184282). (In fact I'd claim it's not a notable fact at all.)
So I'd say that the sense of the word "occupation" as "how one spends one's time" is the better one to apply, and this is why P106 has as its primary label "occupation" and not "profession".
I think the issue here is that we are still very much building a structured database that backs (or is derived from) an encyclopedia. We are not building a statistically-valid database of every human. When we ask someone like Al Capone (Q80048) what his occupation is, we are not looking for the same answer as a census worker or an employment statistician.
(In other words, I'd say you can think of P106 as the slot for filling in the Q-number(s) for whatever profession, occupation, pastime, or activity you find in the first sentence of the subject's Wikipedia article, or Wikidata description.) —Scs (talk) 11:24, 10 August 2020 (UTC)
« it seems to me that fearing alien abductions is not (necessarily) an activity, but closer to a believe system. » →‎ The current English-language Description of conspiracy theorist (Q19831149) item is « person promoting conspiracy theories »: conspiracy theorist (person promoting conspiracy theories). And Alex Jones (Q319121) does not fear or believe anything; it's only for the money. Visite fortuitement prolongée (talk) 19:32, 10 August 2020 (UTC)

  Notified participants of WikiProject Occupations and professions

It seems like what we are looking for is something very similar to instance of (P31) that captures the is-a relationship for humans. I agree that occupation (Q12737077) is probably not the correct term for many of the cases you listed. --Hannes Röst (talk) 21:31, 10 August 2020 (UTC)
instance of (P31) has sometimes been used for this purpose, and I used to agree enough to do it myself–only to see it being moved back to occupation (P106) shortly thereafter.
I've come to feel uneasy about instance of (P31) while working on the import of data from Central Database of Shoah Victims' Names (Q59522549): A statement such as (Q94975069instance of (P31)Holocaust victim (Q5883980), while technically correct, doesn't quite feel right. It reduces that person and their life to only the circumstances of their death and perpetuates their murderers' power over them. And even though serial killers deserve less sympathy, it just doesn't satisfy the curious mind to reduce people to such shallow description. Using more than one value is obviously possible, but anything specific is often not known, and adding human (Q5) almost feels like saying the silent part out loud: "...but still human". Plus, this just invites long discussions where to draw the line between instance of (P31) and the lesser properties: my intuition says we would be more likely to consider people to "be" writer (Q36180)s than landscaper (Q43184282), even where as much time is spent on the latter activity as the first (which, unlike Scs, I do find interesting in relation to Dylann Roof (Q20203314), and, even if not, could see how its inclusion could be useful to others, and have therefore added). But how much do I have to write/publish/sell to be "a" writer, and not just someone who writes? It's a continuum, making it impossible to set any fixed criteria, let alone ones everyone agrees with.
Action item: Find a term that works with these values, but less definitive than "is a"? Or can completely do without them with individual solutions, such as Dylann Roof (Q20203314)convicted of (P1399)murder (Q132821)number confirmed (P1674)"9"?
The Holocaust victim (Q5883980) example came up here a few weeks ago, and it was pointed out that this should definitely not be on instance of (P31), as humans should never have anything other than human (Q5) for that. I don't think anything better was suggested, however. Perhaps significant event (P793) might be better for some of these? --Oravrattas (talk) 05:19, 11 August 2020 (UTC)

SPARQL, how to show references

Folks, who can help me to get the references (links) under the tree of heritage designation (P1435) with archaeological heritage monument in Bavaria (Q97154904). I’m looking for the links which are related to archaeological heritage monument in Bavaria (Q97154904). 

SELECT DISTINCT ?item ?itemLabel ?SG WHERE {
  { SELECT ?item ?BLfDID WHERE { ?item (wdt:P1435/(wdt:P279*)) wd:Q97154904. } }
  ?item (wdt:P131*) wd:Q10451;
    wdt:P1435 ?SG.
  SERVICE wikibase:label { bd:serviceParam wikibase:language "[AUTO_LANGUAGE],en". }
}
Try it!

Many thanks for your help. --Derzno (talk) 13:43, 13 August 2020 (UTC)

Marking logo images that exist but are not in public domain

I recently uploaded an old seal image (P158) of an organization that has fallen into the public domain. I marked its start date and end date, but to make extra sure no one thinks it's the current logo, I would like to somehow mark that it has a more recent seal, but that it just isn't in the public domain yet. How can I do that when there's no image on Commons to link to? "Unknown value" and "no value" both don't seem fully appropriate, since there is a known value, just not one I can represent with a Commons file. Thoughts? {{u|Sdkb}} talk 21:55, 10 August 2020 (UTC)

If it's a logo that is no longer in use, but the organization is extant, and it would be misleading for the logo to appear in any of the robot sources that mindlessly suck from Wikidata (e.g. if it would be the default image from a simple Google search) then it might be marked as deprecated, and reason for deprecated rank (P2241) perhaps given as anachronism (Q189203) or property is not suitable for entity (Q86191979). Or maybe there's a better way, if so, do that: Wikidata is still the Wild West. Anything goes, buckaroo. -Animalparty (talk) 02:04, 11 August 2020 (UTC)
@Animalparty: Sounds alright. From a longer-term perspective, we might want to find a way to note the existence of fair use images, since I doubt this is the only instance that's ever come up where it's been desired to link to one. {{u|Sdkb}} talk 03:03, 11 August 2020 (UTC)
deprecated rank isn't meant for this. --- Jura 08:54, 12 August 2020 (UTC)
@Sdkb: User @Animalparty: is wrong here. Deprecated rank should not be used for old information which is factual. An end time (P582) and end cause (P1534) qualifier are both suitable for such a statement. There may be a suitable end cause to show that the logo is replaced by a newer one. As for a new statement to add, I would say that "unknown value" with a matching start date is most appropriate. It's really more like "some value", just that it is unknown to whoever retrieves it from Wikidata (as it's not stored here, which can be for many reasons). --SilentSpike (talk) 10:27, 12 August 2020 (UTC)
SilentSpike Cool. Is there a place where this is explicitly stated on Wikidata? I've been on Wikdata for years and most formal guidance, if there is any, seems obscure and hard to find. Hence, wild wild west. -Animalparty (talk) 01:41, 13 August 2020 (UTC)
Ranks are explained at Help:Ranking. --- Jura 05:29, 13 August 2020 (UTC)
@Jura1: Looking at that page, the right thing to do seems to be to give the current value (of unknown, per User:SilentSpike) preferred ranking, and just leave the old one at normal. Suggestion for Wikidata's interface: Help:Ranking should be linked underneath the options anytime someone opens the selection for them. Is there anything specific I should use for reason for preferred rank (P7452)? {{u|Sdkb}} talk 16:21, 13 August 2020 (UTC)
@Sdkb: Could use most recent value (Q71533355) --SilentSpike (talk) 18:00, 13 August 2020 (UTC)

Pearle vs Pearle vision

Hi,

I noticed that Pearle (europe) and Pearle Vision (US) don't have seperate wikidata pages. I was wondering if those should be split (seeing as they are a different division and have different branding as well)

Cheers, Thibault  – The preceding unsigned comment was added by Thibaultmol (talk • contribs) at 22:37, 13 August 2020 (UTC).

@Thibaultmol: Hi. Can you please give the Q number for the item page you found? You can post it here using the {{Q}} template For example, {{Q|12345}}. Once we know the page, someone can offer you advice. From Hill To Shore (talk) 22:53, 13 August 2020 (UTC)
@From Hill To Shore: This is the item page Pearle Vision (Q2231148) that covers both right now. But I feel like it should be split maybe
It even seems like the European stores are not owned by the same company: en:Pearle_Vision : "The Pearle chain of opticians in Europe is now part of Grandvision and has more than 1000 branches ". So yes, should be split. --Hannes Röst (talk) 02:39, 14 August 2020 (UTC)
cc @From Hill To Shore
Sorry it took me 2 years to reply, kinda dropped off the earth when it comes to wikidata stuff.
So by now Grandvision itself has been bought..
So grandvision is a merger between Pearle Europe B.V. and  Grandvision S.A. and in december 2021 Grandvision got bought by EssilorLuxottica (source dutch wikipedia: https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/GrandVision ) Thibaultmol (talk) 09:29, 21 June 2022 (UTC)

What is the property for the organization in charge of publication when not publisher?

There seems to sometimes be a third publishing layer between author and publisher, and I'm not clear on what property to use to name it: namely, when the work is written for an organization. In this WorldCat record, they describe it as "Responsibility: Peter W.C. Uhlig, James Baker;" "Issued by: Ontario Forest Research Institute;" "Publisher: Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources." So it's a publication of the Forest Research Institute, written by two researchers working at the institute, published by the Ministry. — Levana Taylor (talk) 02:36, 13 August 2020 (UTC)

Would using approved by (P790) as a qualifier on publisher (P123) do what you need? From Hill To Shore (talk) 05:32, 13 August 2020 (UTC)
Well, the actual author is the researchers. I suppose one could list the organization as an additional author but it'd need some sort of qualifier. — Levana Taylor (talk) 18:03, 13 August 2020 (UTC)
Probably not so far off since there are actual humans that wrote the text but the text may represent the opinion of a government agency so in that sense it is a corporate author. Note that no corporation ever writes a text, its always a human who writes the text on behalf of an organization. Maybe we can use issued by (P2378) and expands its definition to not just identifiers but any sort of publication or document? There is also editor (P98) but I dont think it fits.--Hannes Röst (talk) 03:48, 14 August 2020 (UTC)

Constraint violation (subclass)

I have a question regarding this constraint violation: it states that "Values of programming language statements should be instances of one of the following classes (or of one of their subclasses), but C++11 currently isn't: " -- however C++11 (Q1061570) is a subclass of (P279) of C++ (Q2407) which does fulfil the constraint. How should we deal with these cases? Is this an error in modelling and C++11 (Q1061570) should be instance of (P31) programming language (Q9143) or is it an error in the constraint checking code an attributes in the parent should be applied to the subclasses as well and thus C++11 (Q1061570) implicitly already is instance of (P31) programming language (Q9143). I tend towards the latter but I would be interested to hear other people's opinion. --Hannes Röst (talk) 20:12, 13 August 2020 (UTC)

Strange. C++11 has got the property subclass of C++ and C++ is both defined as a subclass and as an instance of programming language (Q9143) (which is also awkward by the way, shouldn't it have only one of those properties?). As the constraint explicitly says, "or of one of their subclasses", I don't understand how this could be a violation. Bever (talk) 22:49, 13 August 2020 (UTC)
Fixed. The warning text only states that the property takes subclasses, but actually it took only instances. You have to look at the actual constraint statement. --SCIdude (talk) 08:07, 14 August 2020 (UTC)

Asking merging two items

I would like to ask to merge Item Template:Pretenders to the Korean throne (Q19694643) to Template:House of Yi (Q20163606) - George6VI (talk) 07:12, 14 August 2020 (UTC)

Covid deaths, should many of these people have Wikidata Items?

I'm wondering about some Wikidata Items I've seen created recently. Should A'zariah Akira Dorsey (Q97350167), Adrienne Eugina Doolin Howard (Q95882581), Alexandra Louise Polansky (Q95890156) really have Wikidata Items, I doubt any of them will ever have links to other Wikimedia projects.*Treker (talk) 21:02, 13 August 2020 (UTC)

I dont see a problem with them passing Wikidata:Notability and therefore they should stay. They are clearly identifiable human people with a serious reference (NY times). However I think some of the descriptions need to be adapted, for example "Had a passion for soul food, cooking, music and her church." is not something I would keep. --Hannes Röst (talk) 21:13, 13 August 2020 (UTC)
Agreed. While the Wikidata inclusion criteria is ludicrously low (basically anything or anyone to which a few words are thrown in any source ever, from Covid victim #195,483 to Donald Trump's hair (Q27493213)), Wikidata is not an obituary or memorial site, and descriptions should be succinct and neutral. -Animalparty (talk) 21:26, 13 August 2020 (UTC)
And yes, eventually, all of us here will be items in Wikidata, during our lives or after, whether we want it or not. It will happen, maybe not today or this century, but eventually it will. The Data demands it (blessed be its name). All of humanity and all of creation will be joined eternally in structured Data, so that robots and future alien visitors can forever query the Earth as it is and as it was in human times. -Animalparty (talk) 21:39, 13 August 2020 (UTC)
I think this leads to a good dataset that likely wouldn't be available elsewhere. ChristianKl ❪✉❫ 20:49, 14 August 2020 (UTC)

Historic monuments of France

Could one of our French colleagues please take a look at monument historique inscrit (Q10387575) and Historical Monument (Q916475), and their Wikipedia links, and clarify the relationship between them (or merge them)?

fr:Pont_Vieux_(Cluses), for example, says the bridge is a fr:Monument historique (France) (aka Q916475); while Wikidata says it is a Q10387575, which doesn't even have a fr.Wikipedia article... Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 09:03, 14 August 2020 (UTC)

There are two types of Historical Monument (Q916475): classified historical monument (Q10387684) and monument historique inscrit (Q10387575). Both latter are filed as subclass of (P279) of the former, which seems appropriate. Jean-Fred (talk) 09:16, 14 August 2020 (UTC)
(This topic is in the scope of Wikidata:WikiProject France/Monuments historiques − I added maintained by WikiProject (P6104) to all three items. Jean-Fred (talk) 09:18, 14 August 2020 (UTC))
Jean-Fred: Thank you; so does "
L'édifice est inscrit au titre des monuments historiques en 1975.
" in fr:Pont_Vieux_(Cluses) need to be made more specific? And are el:Πρόσθετος κατάλογος ιστορικών μνημείων, eo:Registrita Historia Monumento (Francio) and es:Inventario suplementario de monumentos históricos appropriate interwiki links from Q10387575? Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 10:56, 14 August 2020 (UTC)
Jean-Fred (talk) 13:01, 14 August 2020 (UTC)

explosive energy equivalent (P2145)

Wonder if that property should be applied only to true explosions/blasts, explosions that have occured (like 2020 Beirut explosions (Q98073118))// or could apply to weapon (Q728) things (like Blue Peacock (Q885837)) : weapons that did not explode or simply sort of weapons, not specific weapons. Bouzinac (talk) 18:49, 14 August 2020 (UTC)

Currently it does not seem to cover it, but I think we should expand the scope of explosive energy equivalent (P2145) to not just cover explosions but also types of weapons that could produce explosions of a certain size. --Hannes Röst (talk) 19:16, 14 August 2020 (UTC)

Q96785431

Was killer of (Q96785431) created to describe a property that once existed or was once planned? Is it normal to describe a property we do not have? This is my first time encountering a situation like this. --RAN (talk) 19:11, 14 August 2020 (UTC)

  • It has nothing to do with a property being planned or previously existed. It's a inverse property label item (Q65932995). Those are used by the relatedItems gadget. It seems to me quite clear with the existing description and instance of (P31) statement. As it's not the only time that this confusion exist, it might be good to do something to make it more clear. Do you have an idea of what the item would need for it to be clear to you what it's about? ChristianKl ❪✉❫ 20:46, 14 August 2020 (UTC)

Wikidata: edit the number of registered users/contributors

In the Wikidata graph of Wikidata, it claims that the site has 2,565,510 number of registered users/contributors (P1833) but offers no citation. This is probably from Special:Statistics (from 4 years ago).

I'd like to add a new number at a new point in time (today) and properly cite. Unfortunately, the help on editing isn't very forthright about editing semi-protected entries. Can anyone provide any direction?  – The preceding unsigned comment was added by Schmudde (talk • contribs) at 08:30, 11 August 2020 (UTC).

Hi Schmudde, semi-protection is described in the page protection policy. Hazard-SJ (talk) 05:51, 15 August 2020 (UTC)

Entity Explosion - a new browser extension driven by Wikidata

I'm delighted to announce that Entity Explosion is now live. It allows you to discover links and information about a topic you are browsing on other sites. It works on all Wikimedia sites, but also everywhere we have linked external IDs. It wouldn't have been possible without everyone in the community's hard work. Thank you!

Download here: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/entity-explosion/bbcffeclligkmfiocanodamdjclgejcn

The on-wiki project page has more details Wikidata:Entity Explosion.

It's not just for Wikidatans, but I hope you like it! --99of9 (talk) 06:04, 15 August 2020 (UTC)

Azerbaijani help -- merging to items with separate AZ wiki entries

I believe that these two entries are for the same person, and I'd like some advice (or better: help) on how to proceed, as they cannot be merged as-is due to conflicts:

They both have Azerbaijani Wikipedia articles, so the Wikidata entries cannot be merged, but I believe they are different names for the same person. It seems to me that the sensible thing to do would be to combine the articles in the AZ wiki, then merge the Wikidata, but I feel like that ought to be in the hands of someone with the right language skills, which I decidedly lack. It appears that the subject is known by enough different names that someone presumably created the newer article not realizing that the subject was already covered.

The reasons I think they are the same are:

Anyone know how we could proceed with this? Thanks -Kenirwin (talk) 23:44, 14 August 2020 (UTC)

Documentation for Special:Nearby?

I'm trying to find documentation or source code for the Special:Nearby feature. It seems to have been added back in 2015, per this announcement. It isn't the same as this extension (given that extension isn't listed on Special:Version). There's nothing at Help:Nearby (although once I get some information, I'll add it there). Can anyone help point me in the right direction? JesseW (talk) 14:52, 15 August 2020 (UTC)

Surname page vs. disambiguation page

Is this a surname page or a disambiguation page en:Balfe? I think this is an disambiguation page, the surname is not explained in any way. The page is a list of people with the same surname. In contrast, en:Smith (surname) is a surname page to which the name is explained. Please also compare the pages of the other languages that point to Balfe (Q804918). --HarryNº2 (talk) 17:04, 15 August 2020 (UTC)

enwiki doesn't consider it a disambiguation page. Accordingly, there is no icon and tag applied. --- Jura 17:06, 15 August 2020 (UTC)
Actually, the page should be moved here Wikimedia human name disambiguation page (Q22808320). Unfortunately, the page is currently in a deletion discussion. --HarryNº2 (talk) 17:25, 15 August 2020 (UTC)
I don't agree with that. If you edit enwiki and consider that it should be a disambiguation page, maybe you should bring it up there. --- Jura 17:30, 15 August 2020 (UTC)
I think it's more of a site like this: en:List of people with surname Smith. I don't know about enWikipedia. Where can I ask a question about this problem there? --HarryNº2 (talk) 18:05, 15 August 2020 (UTC)
EnWiki uses the template {{surname|Balfe}} and not {{hndis|Balfe}} which would be the template for a human diambiaguation page. That clearly means it's currently a surname page. ChristianKl ❪✉❫ 20:12, 15 August 2020 (UTC)
@HarryNº2: in addition: if you add WikiProjects to these surname articles, they fall into class "list", because such given name and surname articles are so-called "set index articles", see en:Wikipedia:Set index articles--Estopedist1 (talk) 04:43, 16 August 2020 (UTC)

end time

Hello. 2019–20 Cypriot First Division (Q61862331). League suspended due to Covid-19 pandemic at 13 March 2020 and abandoned on 15 May 2000. The last game was played on 9 March 2020. Which is the end time (P582)? Data Gamer play 10:24, 16 August 2020 (UTC)

See criterion used (P1013).--GZWDer (talk) 11:07, 16 August 2020 (UTC)

home venue

Hello. Recently was added in home venue (P115) that property scope constraint (Q53869507) -> property scope (P5314) -> as main value (Q54828448). I disagree. home venue (P115) can be used as as qualifier (Q54828449). For example, when you want to add the information what was the home venue of each participated team in a league or a cup. Moreover, sometimes a team uses different home venue in a cup competition because their home venue can not be used for such games (a team for lower divisions, but the original home venue can be uses for league games of that division).

What are your opinions? Data Gamer play 10:36, 16 August 2020 (UTC)

Bots not required to be Open Source?

Have I missed something? I thought bots were required to point to their source and I'm doing this but, when I skimmed over a few bot user pages nothing could be found. How can you sensibly review a bot if no source is given? On the other hand, is there a single reason why you would not require this? --SCIdude (talk) 09:20, 15 August 2020 (UTC)

  • Where did you get this from?
Bots are usually approved based on test edits and operators history with automated edits (or refused based on messes they created before). --- Jura 09:33, 15 August 2020 (UTC)
  • Perhaps you read that bots hosted on toolforge must be open source [5]. I'm sure a lot of one-off scripts have been used to edit Wikidata and were never published anywhere. Ghouston (talk) 09:56, 15 August 2020 (UTC)
What's wrong with publishing these, e.g. using gist? Not only does it create trust, it helps other people, those writing themselves, or scientists doing surveys about them. I still haven't seen a good reason for not requiring it. --SCIdude (talk) 10:04, 15 August 2020 (UTC)
I generally think it's a good idea to make bot code open source (pi bot's is), and it's required if you run anything on toolforge. However, some other bot operators have issues with making code open source, e.g., see phab:T189747 (constraint violation updates). Thanks. Mike Peel (talk) 10:32, 15 August 2020 (UTC)
  • We already often have people use QuickStatement instead of using a bot when I would prefer a bot. Adding further requirements for bots seem to me to be counterproductive. ChristianKl ❪✉❫ 21:58, 16 August 2020 (UTC)

Patrolling

Should I mark a page as patrolled when I nominate it for deletion? They do that on enwiki. Prahlad (tell me all about it / private venue) (Please {{ping}} me.) 19:36, 15 August 2020 (UTC)

That makes sense, as it reduces the backlog of recent changes to save other patrollers a significant amount of time. —Hasley 22:54, 15 August 2020 (UTC)
@Hasley: thanks for the advice. Prahlad (tell me all about it / private venue) (Please {{ping}} me.) 16:04, 16 August 2020 (UTC)

Senator Harris

Can someone cleanup the three statements about her tenure in senate?

Apparently there is said to be some consensus on how to do it, but the statements on Q10853588#P39 seem somewhat messy. There is no position called "United States senator (116th Congress)". --- Jura 07:34, 15 August 2020 (UTC)

@Jura1: Can you provide sources to clarify your claim? I plan on cleaning this up. Adding Q98077491 is part of this process. I think the driver should be both accuracy and descriptiveness. The more descriptive the more info can be gleaned from the source data.
Also, I plan on cleaning this up for all historical senators. Doing this piecemeal by senator is not the right approach in my opinion. -- Gettinwikiwidit (talk) 10:20, 15 August 2020 (UTC)
Can you revert the mess and then outline what you plan to do? It's not ok to do experiments on live items. --- Jura 10:00, 15 August 2020 (UTC)
@Jura1: I'm sorry. I don't understand why you insist on hurling insults and making this conversation unproductive. It makes it very difficult to add value in that setting. -- Gettinwikiwidit (talk) 10:20, 15 August 2020 (UTC)
You seem to agree that cleaning up is required. How would you describe the situation? Unclean? Dirty? --- Jura 10:42, 15 August 2020 (UTC)
@Jura1: You're not engaging with any of the information I'm providing. You're simply declaring yourself the arbiter of right and wrong. I'm happy to have a productive conversation about the data but not to genuflect. When you're ready for the former, please let me know. -- Gettinwikiwidit (talk) 10:47, 15 August 2020 (UTC)
I'm ok with a mere revert. Did you seek consensus for the change you made? As you are aware, in the meantime I listed Q98077491 for deletion. --- Jura 10:49, 15 August 2020 (UTC)
@Jura1: I have no idea what you're talking about. Revert what? Moreover, this strikes me as coming pretty close to the line of harassment. More generally, I thought the idea is to provide an atmosphere where people want to contribute and not to intimidate them from contributing. -- Gettinwikiwidit (talk) 10:51, 15 August 2020 (UTC)
@Jura1: Please delete that request. You made it without discussion and you've avoided every attempt at a productive conversation on that request. -- Gettinwikiwidit (talk) 10:55, 15 August 2020 (UTC)
It's up for discussion there, you even participated there (?). Please supply the requested references there.
This doesn't avoid that Kamala Harris (Q10853588) featured on Wikidata's main page needs to be fixed (or cleaned-up if you prefer) speedily.
I have asked if you had thought consensus for the changes you made there ([6][7]), but apparently you can't supply that. --- Jura 11:06, 15 August 2020 (UTC)
@Jura1: I'm sorry, you did not ask if I had thought consensus. You asked me to open a discussion, which I had. I have recently pinged you on that discussion. I am being honest that I am happy to have a productive conversation about the data itself. You requested to delete this entry because of a reference is not consistent with other similar entries. You somewhat disingenuously suggested we start a discussion to delete United States senator (Q4416090). That doesn't strike me as productive engagement. I remain open to productive discussion. -- Gettinwikiwidit (talk) 11:12, 15 August 2020 (UTC)
The question about deletion of Q4416090 was yours, not mine. Sorry I meant "sougth" not "thought" as I wrote "seek" above. In what discussion did you ping me? Did you discuss this previously under another username? --- Jura 11:18, 15 August 2020 (UTC)
@Jura1: I was questioning you and you made the suggestion to delete it. It's pretty plain for anyone reading it. -- Gettinwikiwidit (talk) 11:24, 15 August 2020 (UTC)
Let people read it then. Can you answer the two other questions? --- Jura 11:26, 15 August 2020 (UTC)
@Gettinwikiwidit: can you respond to the two other questions? Please use ~~~~ to sign your comments. --- Jura 11:36, 15 August 2020 (UTC)
You're ignoring my obvious point that the question about the reference doesn't explain why we should leave in United States senator (Q4416090). Obviously there is room for discussion which is what I'm trying to do but you seem to want to avoid. Moreover, will you acknowledge that there are "congresses" for which senators occupy a seat? I've clearly supplied an identity of subject in context (P4649) for Q98077491 for clarity. Aside from this being plainly accurate it also allows the information to reflect the reality of how the U.S. Senate is conducted. If you're unwilling to discuss why I feel you've made this conversation unproductive, I'll have to follow the next steps. -- Gettinwikiwidit (talk) 11:38, 15 August 2020 (UTC)
Can we focus this on the topic at hand ("Senator Harris" featured on Wikidata's main page) and provide references for statements we make (your "I have recently pinged you on that discussion.")? As I don't recall, have you commented on this topic under another username?
I stopped commenting about the deletion of Q4416090 and let interested users re-read who wrote what elsewhere.
If there are specific statements on Kamala Harris (Q10853588) you want to discuss, please confirm which ones. --- Jura 11:49, 15 August 2020 (UTC)
This is on topic. You're simply trying to manhandle all discussion of it. -- Gettinwikiwidit (talk) 11:53, 15 August 2020 (UTC)
Pretty much this exact discussion has come up previously in relation to modelling in the UK, Estonia, Iceland, and a variety of other countries, and despite Jura's vehement objections to it, it has been deemed acceptable. (See, for some examples, the links at Wikidata:Requests_for_deletions#Q98077491). I have no particular opinion on whether this is the best approach to take for the US Senate, but it is certainly a valid modelling approach in Wikidata, and has been used with great success to date. Jura seems to be being at best disingenuous is this regard, and straying perilously close to bullying. --Oravrattas (talk) 11:54, 15 August 2020 (UTC)
@Oravrattas: Yes, I agree, but to try to close out this discussion. @Jura1: YOU created this topic. We're discussing your demand for change. On this point I'm suggesting that much more than Kamala Harris is inconsistent. As mentioned, I plan on backfilling all historical senators in a consistent way. I've pinged you on the discussion and seen previous discussions. Productive conversation is always welcome. The focus should be making Wikipedia more usable in the various senses of the term. -- Gettinwikiwidit (talk) 08:43, 16 August 2020 (UTC)

┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘

  • The conclusion I draw from the discussion on User talk:Gettinwikiwidit seems to be that I wasn't pinged anywhere (due to the lack of signature) and likely never asked them to open such a discussion. It seems to have the same level as their argument about deleting Q4416090.
Given that there is no consensus for the changes at [8][9], I'd restore the previous version.--- Jura 12:57, 15 August 2020 (UTC)
@Jura1: Reverting would make this entry inconsistent with the rest of the senators in the 116th Congress and you still haven't clarified what your concern is. You are right that there remain inconsistencies now, but as I mentioned I plan on filling out entries for the entire historical senators following this pattern. Reverting for no clear purpose without cleaning up all the consistencies you seem to care about leaves us not much better off than if we don't revert. My plan is to follow the same pattern when entering all historical senator data and then removing statements not fitting that pattern. I will leave in all statements attributing position to United States senator (Q4416090) not referring to a specific term with the understanding that such entries should contain information about the entire time spent in this office. Again, I understand that it's currently inconsistent, but I'm currently in discussion with the Asst. Senate Historian to get clarification on inconsistencies between their data and what's currently in Wikipedia. Once that is resolved I plan on uploading the whole lot. -- Gettinwikiwidit (talk) 08:38, 16 August 2020 (UTC)
To be clear, the discussion of United States senator (Q4416090) was not advocating for its removal, it was drawing a contrast with the proposal to remove Q98077491 since the argument presented for the latter would appear to apply to the former as well, which I think we can all agree shouldn't be removed. -- Gettinwikiwidit (talk) 08:38, 16 August 2020 (UTC)
Just saw this discussion. Two issues to add:
  • enwiki is seeing an onslaught of attempts to specifically discredit her citizenship and her categorisation as South-East Asian and African American. This article in The Atlantic is a good outline of these issues and is somewhat positive wrt. enwiki's performance overall.
We are lucky not to get that sort of scrutiny. Because here, the same malevolent edit was made more than a year ago, in March 2019, and allowed to stand until today. The only action on it was Laddo adding a source two weeks ago. Unfortunately, the source in no way supports the claim that her ethnicity is "West Indian". The word "west" does not even appear in it! Instead, it says "[..] feel she has not previously put as much focus on her South Asian roots" and quotes her autobiography, saying “My mother understood very well that she was raising two black daughters".

Upload of demographic data to Commons, opinions needed

We are currently planning to transfer population time series about the ca 35k French municipalites from frwiki modules Common's data namespace. Using Commons and linking with Wikidata solves the copyright issues and simplifies many practical questions that have prevented us for years from uploading this sort of data to Wikidata. But we need to do it right. So here is a short summary.

  • File content:
    • 1 file per municipality (or whatever adminsitrative level we are working on)
    • Only contains the official data the total population. If data from an alternative source are considered interesting we can create a second file.
    • Only data about the total population. Data about subtopics, say female population, should go to separate files to keep the data structure simple.
  • Data structure:
    • data are entirely tr:anslatable to Wikidata statements if needed (thus easy to copy to Wikidata when relevant and legally feasible)
    • fields name, contain the name id of the equivalent property. It starts with a P for values that could be used as main statement values or qualifiers, and with a S for sources. This is similar to quickstatements.
    • fields include date, number, "criterion used" (who is counted), determination method (how they are counted), a source and a source url.
  • Link to Wikidata:

@Ricordisamoa, VIGNERON, ValterVB, S-1-5-7, Jheald: any comment  ? I think it is important that we agree that we have a general standard if we want those data to be really usable.-Zolo (talk) 16:39, 16 August 2020 (UTC)

  • Thanks for the info. As it's about editing Commons, maybe it should be discussed there. I think we already have some time series for cities in Taiwan. --- Jura 10:57, 17 August 2020 (UTC)

member of the crew of vs. crew member

Property:P5096 vs. Property:P1029, can someone edit the Descriptions so it is clear when to use one and when to use the other. One must be for the name of the vessel and the other the name of the person that is a crew member of that vessel, but they both have similar descriptions using the word "person". There must be a clearer way to let an editor know more clearly that one is meant to be the name of a ship and the other the name of a person, if my interpretation is correct. --RAN (talk) 20:30, 16 August 2020 (UTC)

According to Wikidata:Property proposal/member of the crew of the plan was to create member of the crew of (P5096) and then deprecate crew member(s) (P1029). I'm guessing that the second step didn't occur. From Hill To Shore (talk) 21:07, 16 August 2020 (UTC)
Yes, at the time crew member(s) (P1029) was limited to astronauts, but other occupations have since been added to the constraint. The main reason for keeping inverse properties seems to be so that the information can be included in templates: do any Wikipedia templates require crew member(s) (P1029), or can it be nominated for deprecation and deletion, or should it be kept for some other reason? Ghouston (talk) 00:49, 17 August 2020 (UTC)
It seems at least a few wikis are using the Property but I have not looked at it in more detail: https://www.wikidata.org/w/index.php?title=Property:P1029&action=info (This is not necessarily a complete list based on how this is tracked.) --LydiaPintscher (talk) 09:45, 17 August 2020 (UTC)
Thanks, the usage on itwiki is for a space-mission template, used for example on it:Apollo 9. That was the original use of the property. Ghouston (talk) 09:52, 17 August 2020 (UTC)

[Significant change] New datatype fields in Lexeme JSON output

This is an announcement for a significant (but not breaking) change to the JSON output of WikibaseLexeme entities, specifically of Senses and Forms, when obtained via Special:EntityData or the Wikibase API endpoints like Special:ApiHelp/wbgetentities.

The Snak output in the Wikibase JSON serialization usually contains a datatype field for each Snak. Previously, these fields were missing for statements within Senses and Forms of a Lexeme:

JSON output for they (L371) (abridged)
 
{
  "id": "L371",
  "lemmas": { "en": { "language": "en", "value": "they" } },
  "lexicalCategory": "Q468801",
  "language": "Q1860",
  "claims": {
    "P31": [
      {
        "mainsnak": {
          "snaktype": "value",
          "property": "P31",
          "datavalue": {
            "value": { "entity-type": "item", "numeric-id": 16321184, "id": "Q16321184" },
            "type": "wikibase-entityid"
          },
          "datatype": "wikibase-item"
        },
        "type": "statement",
        "qualifiers": { /* ... */ },
        "id": "L371$0ec0c195-4b6b-ba3c-6db6-37f3ef1478c7",
        "rank": "normal"
      }
    ]
  },
  "forms": [
    // ...
    {
      "id": "L371-F7",
      "representations": { /* ... */ },
      "grammaticalFeatures": [],
      "claims": {
        "P5323": [
          {
            "mainsnak": {
              "snaktype": "value",
              "property": "P5323",
              "datavalue": {
                "value": { "entity-type": "item", "numeric-id": 19051845, "id": "Q19051845" },
                "type": "wikibase-entityid"
              }
            },
            "type": "statement",
            "id": "L371-F7$f8b4f02a-4315-3dad-2483-1974e750b995",
            "rank": "normal"
          }
        ]
      }
    }
  ],
  "senses": [
    {
      "id": "L371-S1",
      "glosses": {
        "en": {
          "language": "en",
          "value": "single person, previously mentioned, of unknown or non-binary gender"
        }
      },
      "claims": {
        "P5137": [
          {
            "mainsnak": {
              "snaktype": "value",
              "property": "P5137",
              "datavalue": {
                "value": { "entity-type": "item", "numeric-id": 3437264, "id": "Q3437264" },
                "type": "wikibase-entityid"
              }
            },
            "type": "statement",
            "id": "L371-S1$0e5ac6c7-4089-30ac-9626-522919a7cfc8",
            "rank": "normal"
          },
          // ...
        ],
        // ...
      }
    },
    // ...
  ]
}

Starting on (barring unexpected deployment issues; on Test Wikidata), these datatype fields will be present there as well.

If you have any issue or question, feel free to leave a comment at T249206.

-- Lucas Werkmeister (WMDE) (talk) 12:09, 17 August 2020 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #429

 
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Tool of the week
    • Entity Explosion: a new multilingual Chrome browser extension. "Taking the power of Wikidata with me wherever I go across the web!". Uses API calls to the Wikidata Query Service to match the URL you are browsing on to a Wikidata item, and then displays data and links to other sites about the same entity. (Video)
  • Development
    • Fixed a bug where a length limit for strings seems to have reverted itself back from 1500 to its default 400 (phabricator:T259440)
    • Fixed a bug that Wikibase is not always adding &redirect=no in situations when MediaWiki usually does (phabricator:T255387)
    • Wrapping up the initial work on the design system so it is ready for use in the first new feature (Query Builder)
    • Fixed the serialization of statements on Forms and Senses not containing the datatype (phabricator:T249206)
    • Wrapping up work on the first version of Federated Properties so that other Wikibase installations can use Wikidata's Properties instead of having to maintain their own
    • Worked on ensuring the data from the linked data interface at Special:EntityData is always up to date after an edit has been made (phabricator:T128486)
    • Enabling clients to use Lua to request labels, descriptions and aliases in some (often minority) languages even when they are not content languages (phabricator:T259340, phabricator:T260118)


You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here. If you want to help, you can also have a look at the tasks needing a volunteer.

Are teleplay (Q356055) and television play (Q7697093) different ?

I'd like to add a large number 4k+ Polish television plays that date back to the 50s. Originally they were broadcast live, then recorded in TV studio and then aired (even several years later) but nowadays they are hardly distinguishable from a television film/mini-series. What they all have in common is that they are produced or outsourced from film companies for the public television station (TVP).

What instance of (P31) should I use ? Are the above mentioned entities identical or only related to each other? Please help sort it out. Kpjas (talk) 11:41, 16 August 2020 (UTC)

@Kpjas: Looking at the English Wikipedia articles for both, they are different: teleplay (Q356055) is a script (i.e. written work) whereas television play (Q7697093) is a genre (just as how reality television is another genre). It sounds like you want television play (Q7697093), unless you're talking about the written works. Hazard-SJ (talk) 03:04, 18 August 2020 (UTC)

Captain Firstname Lastname vs. Firstname Lastname

With the import of The Peerage we have many entries with "Captain Firstname Lastname" or "Lord Firstname Lastname" "Sir Firstname Lastname" or "Reverend Firstname Lastname" vs. our old system of "Firstname Lastname", do we plan to standardize on one or the other? When we merge duplicates we have to decide which one to keep and which to make an alias. --RAN (talk) 20:59, 16 August 2020 (UTC)

For the English labels, I suppose we are following the English Wikipedia article naming conventions by default en:Wikipedia:Naming conventions (people). I don't see any advantage in doing anything different. Ghouston (talk) 00:59, 17 August 2020 (UTC)

OK, if that's standard practice, then I'll start moving "Captain Firstname Lastname" from primary to alias status whenever I see it (though it doesn't seem like a high priority for cleanup) — Levana Taylor (talk) 06:56, 17 August 2020 (UTC)

Weather Database and WikiProject Weather

Good afternoon. I'd like to bring your attention to a proposal for a WikiProject Weather, to organize all weather articles under a single project umbrella. There are many areas that Wikipedia has missed, maybe because it was a long time ago, or it is in a country that doesn't speak English. Also, given climate denialism, I believe it is important to establish a Worldwide Weather Database. Google already uses Wikipedia's infoboxes for their search results, and Alexa often uses Wikipedia (partly because it's more accurate, partly because of how comprehensive it is). I'm not exactly sure the best way to implement it, but I believe that WikiData, and the proposed Abstract Wikipedia, could be a part of this endeavor.

As part of uniting all weather articles, each event would be tagged with categories such as location, date, fatalities, injuries, damage total, and weather event - all the basic stuff we usually include in infoboxes. The international disasters database - [10] - already kinda does this, but not everyone knows to look there. Wikipedia, on the other hand, is known as an institution at this point.

Thanks for your time reading this. Any thoughts and feedback would be appreciated. If this proposal is in the wrong place, please direct me to the correct location. Thanks a lot. Hurricanehink (talk) 18:29, 12 August 2020 (UTC)

@Hurricanehink: Yes, this is a good place to leave such a message. However, you may want to leave additional messages at Wikidata:WikiProject Weather observations/en and Wikidata:WikiProject Climate Change. From Hill To Shore (talk) 20:08, 12 August 2020 (UTC)
Consider also Wikidata:WikiProject Humanitarian Wikidata. Blue Rasberry (talk) 13:59, 13 August 2020 (UTC)
As the co-nominator of the proposal, I have left messages at all 3 suggested locations.Jason Rees (talk) 21:13, 15 August 2020 (UTC)
@Jason Rees:, I would like to raise the point that one should be cautious about the usage of the word Weather alone. It is defined in Wiktionary like The short term state of the atmosphere at a specific time and place, including the temperature, relative humidity, cloud cover, precipitation, wind, etc. This definition is very broad and inludes much more than what is discussed in this topic, which is more for Significant Weather Event, like tornado or heat wave, from what I understand. Not for "weather" in general. I suggest to add a word specfiying what side of Weather is concerned. This comment also apply to Weather of 2020. This is why in the Wikidata:WikiProject Weather observations/en, where we envision to include in Wikidata the observations and normals of all Canadian Weather Stations, we have added the word Observations after Weather. The same could be done with this project, if it is accepted. Hope this helps, Dirac (talk) 02:38, 16 August 2020 (UTC)
Thanks @Dirac: for the feedback and the refreshing refresher about the definition of weather. @Hurricanehink: has already put forward the idea of a weather database which I support and thus I would argue that the project should be covering all types of weather and the impacts that the weather has. For example: the Stonehaven derailment last week has been attributed to the severe weather in that region and thus should be classified as a part of a weather wikiproject. However, at the moment I feel that the best way forward is to take baby steps, talk to other editors and figure out the best way forward. That could even be taking some of what you guys have done with the Canadian Weather Stations and expanding it to include the weather stations around the world and using the data on Wikipeida in the climate articles subject to the rules around Copyright, Original Research and Calculation.Jason Rees (talk) 11:51, 18 August 2020 (UTC)

Can we get the distance between wikidata entries?

Hello community!

Let's say we have human (Q5) or Homo sapiens (Homo sapiens (Q15978631)) and we later find the entry leg (leg (Q133105)) and something more distant like chicken nugget (chicken nugget (Q1072190)). I would love to get the paths connecting these entries in the sense of human -- subclass of -- X -- instance of --- Z ... leg. I perhaps could retrieve all parents of an entry save them and externally merge them, however ideally I can do this via Wikidata SPARQL directly. So is it possible to retrieve all paths connecting two entries via Wikidata SPARQL?

Thanks!

Maybe as Wikidata:Request_a_query ? --Hannes Röst (talk) 14:30, 18 August 2020 (UTC)
I think restricting the graph to P31 and P279 would give very unsatisfying results. Ideally you want every non-ID property for this. Also, I think SPARQL is not suited for this, but I would be delighted to be proven wrong. The complexity would be O(E + log(...)) with E the number of graph edges, i.e. statements (1). --SCIdude (talk) 07:23, 19 August 2020 (UTC)

As SCIdude mentions, this is unlikely to work in the general case. The following restricts it to just the parent taxon (P171) relation. In the following, substitute (wdt:P31/wdt:P279/etc) for every wdt:P171 to widen the relations searched (but emotionally prepare for failure). This would be the "pure" (some would say "naive") query: 

SELECT ?homo ?homoLabel ?root ?rootLabel ?chicken ?chickenLabel
WHERE 
{
  ?homo wdt:P225 "Homo sapiens sapiens" .
  ?chicken wdt:P225 "Gallus gallus domesticus" .
  ?chicken wdt:P171+ ?root .
  ?root ^wdt:P171+ ?homo .
  SERVICE wikibase:label { bd:serviceParam wikibase:language "[AUTO_LANGUAGE],en". }
}
Try it!

But, unfortunately, it times out. It either (attempts to) load the entire tree of species, or the frequent bifurcations in both directions along the not-entirely-accurately-named "tree" make it grow too fast even for an optimized strategy.

I got this to work, however: 

SELECT ?homo ?homoLabel ?root ?rootLabel ?chicken ?chickenLabel
WHERE 
{
  ?homo wdt:P225 "Homo sapiens sapiens" .
  ?chicken wdt:P225 "Gorilla gorilla" .
  ?chicken wdt:P171?/wdt:P171?/wdt:P171 ?root .
  ?root ^wdt:P171+ ?homo .
  SERVICE wikibase:label { bd:serviceParam wikibase:language "[AUTO_LANGUAGE],en". }
}
Try it!

This is an easier case, as gorilla and human are closer, taxonomically if not culinarily, than human and chicken. I also limit the depth of the search to a maximum of three for the way "down" from any checked root. There is "+" meaning "one or more", "*" meaning "zero or more", but unfortunately no "{1,5}" for "from one to five", so I used the ugly construction with consecutive "?"s. "^" is the inverse-of modifier that lets you reverse the direction along the tree.

You may be able to find relations between more distant taxons by trying around with the depth, adding a limitation for the upward search and, in turn, allowing more on the way down. --Matthias Winkelmann (talk) 07:33, 19 August 2020 (UTC)

I don't have much experience with the RDF_GAS_API, but I think it is useful here as it works at least for a couple of arbitrary steps to find a link from chicken nugget (Q1072190) to human leg (Q6027402) for instance: 

PREFIX gas: <http://www.bigdata.com/rdf/gas#>
SELECT ?depth ?subject ?subjectLabel ?predicate ?object ?objectLabel {
  SERVICE gas:service {
     gas:program gas:gasClass 'com.bigdata.rdf.graph.analytics.BFS';
                 gas:in wd:Q1072190;
                 gas:target wd:Q6027402;
                 gas:out ?object;
                 gas:out1 ?depth;
                 gas:out2 ?subject;
                 gas:maxIterations 12;
                 gas:maxVisited 10000 .
  }
  ?subject ?predicate ?object . # figure out what link type(s) connect a vertex with a predecessor
  FILTER(?depth > 0) . # remove dead ends from results
  SERVICE wikibase:label { bd:serviceParam wikibase:language 'en' }
} ORDER BY ASC(?depth)
Try it!

 Others can maybe improve this query, or even figure out a better way to use the RDF_GAS_API. ---MisterSynergy (talk) 08:21, 19 August 2020 (UTC)

Wikiversity: Lua error in Module:Citation/CS1/Identifiers at line 1014: attempt to compare nil with number., Wikidata Q36472504

Can someone help with a syntax error on Wikiversity:Research, Education and Economic Growth: The fourth line in "References" is

{{cite Q|Q36472504}}

which gets translated as:

Lua error in Module:Citation/CS1/Identifiers at line 1014: attempt to compare nil with number., Wikidata Q36472504

Thanks, DavidMCEddy (talk) 06:51, 19 August 2020 (UTC)

It works here: James Heckman; Seong Hyeok Moon; Rodrigo Pinto; Peter Savelyev; Adam Yavitz (1 January 2010). "Analyzing social experiments as implemented: A reexamination of the evidence from the HighScope Perry Preschool Program". Quantitative Economics. 1 (1): 1–46. doi:10.3982/QE8. ISSN 1759-7323. PMC 3524308. PMID 23255883. Zbl 1284.62793. Wikidata Q36472504.  --- Jura 06:53, 19 August 2020 (UTC)

Yes, I know it works here. The same syntax displays properly in many other places in Wikiversity, including with 7 other superficially identical {{cite Q|...}} references. Only this one fails there.
If my memory is correct, {{cite Q|...}} didn't work on Wikiversity until I asked a Wikidata wizard about it at Wikimania Cape Town. With this background, I thought it might be easier to find a fix here than asking in Wikiversity.
Thanks, DavidMCEddy (talk) 07:09, 19 August 2020 (UTC)
Module:Citation/CS1 here came from w:Module:Citation/CS1 in 2018. Supposedly that is the master copy. Testing there, it works too.
Maybe a new import from w: is needed at wikiversity. In any case, Module:Citation/CS1 doesn't seem to be maintained here. --- Jura 07:34, 19 August 2020 (UTC)
Some configuration (namely a "handler for PMC") is missing or not properly set on Wikiversity. This should help you if you seek help from the authors of the modules. --Matěj Suchánek (talk) 07:56, 19 August 2020 (UTC)
Thanks. With your help I found Wikiversity:Module talk:Citation/CS1. I just copied the three potentially helpful replies into the associated Wikiversity:Module talk:Citation/CS1 page with a {{re|...}} notification to the user who most recently modified that page. Thanks again, DavidMCEddy (talk) 13:50, 19 August 2020 (UTC)

Wikidata Bridge v1 to be deployed on Catalan Wikipedia

Hello all,

 
Screenshot of the test Bridge

As you may know, in the past months, the Wikidata development team has been working on the first version of the Wikidata Bridge, the feature that will allow Wikipedia editors to edit Wikidata content directly from their infoboxes on the Wikipedia interface.

The first version is about to be deployed on Catalan Wikipedia, the first Wikipedia community to try it, who’s been providing great enthusiasm and support towards the project. The deployment will take place on August 18th and we’ll carefully monitor the possible issues during the upcoming weeks.

The first version of the Bridge includes minimal features, such as editing string datatype values, displaying the existing Wikidata references, adapting the rank depending on the reason for the edit (fix or update), and redirecting to Wikidata for actions that are not yet possible with the Bridge. It is not the final version, many improvements will be made in the future, but we wanted to have a first version out as soon as possible, to see if it works for the editors and collect feedback.

On Wikidata, edits coming from the Bridge will be flagged with the tag Data Bridge. We also made sure to check the different levels of protections, so items that are protected on Wikidata cannot be edited from Wikipedia, and users who are blocked on Wikidata cannot edit from Wikipedia.

It’s an exciting step in the direction of more collaboration between Wikidata and Wikipedia editors, and we’re looking forward to welcoming more Wikipedia editors on Wikidata!

You can follow the progress of the feature on this documentation page and on the related talk page. If you have any questions or suggestions, let us know. Cheers, Lea Lacroix (WMDE) (talk) 11:59, 11 August 2020 (UTC)

Linking Medieval Sources (mostly from the Regesta Imperii (Q316838))

Full disclosure: I work for the Regesta Imperii.

  • We from the RI have reworked some of our published and unpublished indices of Persons and Places and identified existing entities in our registries and added new entities on Wikidata for which we have enough source material.
  • As a next step, we want to link the URIs of our Regesta to the respective Entities on Wikidata via the described by source (P1343) property. I have started with that, but there have been some.. challenges. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it created empty statements.
  • Structurally, the Regesta Imperii has 14 departments structured around dynasties and emperors, representing around 180.000 Regesta, sourced from charters between the 9th and 16th century. From these 180.000, ~30.000 correspond to identified entities on Wikidata. We are in the process of creating entities for our collections, for example Regesta Imperii XIII (Q97879676) and linking the respective Regesta to it's department, so the user can differentiate.
  • The main benefit from linking the Regesta in the first place is, besides of linking to sources, the ability to trace the activity of a noble family, for example, over the centuries. We have linked individual nobles to their respective noble families, and when the Regesta are linked to the respective nobles, one could ascertain what members of these noble families have been up to during the reigns of different emperors and dynasties.
  • A secondary benefit, which we have no direct control over, is to link other collections of medieval sources via the same property, so users can get the contemporary breadth besides the temporal one. We are currently in talks with the Germania Sacra project (Germania Sacra (Q1514123)) to link Regesta to the entities they have identified in their indices.
  • Based on the experiences from the test runs, we have decided to only link to Person entities identified in our indices for now, because since most of our places are cities, there is an disproportionately amount of Regesta pertaining to these cities, wihtout meaningful distinction as of yet. We have to come up with a better ontology for these cases and would love some input for that. In general, we want to start with more general statements and work up to more specific ones, as the quality of our data improves.
  • Excellent idea to integrate these here. Just a few comments:
described by source (P1343) you are using is generally meant for encyclopedias or other reference works that include an article about the subject. E.g. Q150575#P1343 would have articles about the emperor. It's not meant as a way to include every time a person is mentioned in a document. It can be an entry in an online database.
Maybe we should clearly distinguish a couple of elements:
  • (a) the website www.regesta-imperii.de
  • (b) available indexes on the website (1 entry per person, place etc.)
  • (c) the series Regesta Imperii (Q316838) (or Regesta Imperii XIII (Q97879676) ) or reproduced on www.regesta-imperii.de
  • (d) individual documents in the series
  • (e) persons and places mentioned in these documents (or signatories of them)
  • (f) the regesta about the document (d) in the series
As mentioned on your talk page, there are essentially two ways of doing that:
  1. one links (b) with described by source (P1343)
  2. one creates items for (d) and uses the appropriate properties to link persons, places etc. (similar to Magna Carta (Q12519) )
I'm not entirely sure which approach I'd suggest. It seems clear that [11] or [12] isn't ideal.
BTW 180000 would be (d) and 30000 (e)? --- Jura 13:17, 13 August 2020 (UTC)
This sounds like a great project, and I agree with Jura that we do not want a collection of outlinks added to individual items such as Ferdinand III, Holy Roman Emperor (Q150575) where the entity is simply mentioned. It does not seem like there is a 1:1 mapping between entities in WD and your entities, e.g. you dont have an "article" about Ferdinand III, Holy Roman Emperor (Q150575) but you have correspondence that are "tagged" with "Wien" (either written in Wien or related to Wien). It seems there is this but this is auto-generated. As Jura pointed out, in this case it would be best to create a new item that now has a 1:1 mapping to your entry, for example create an item titled "[RI XIII] Friedrich III. (1440-1493) - [RI XIII] H. 26" and then link it to http://www.regesta-imperii.de/id/1474-01-17_1_0_13_8_0_12354_346 -- best using a Property with an external identifier (1474-01-17_1_0_13_8_0_12354_346). You can then use all available Wikidata properties to link that item to other items in Wikidata, such as using author (P50) for the author of a document. Do you have an example document that you could create an item for so that we can give a concrete example? --Hannes Röst (talk) 14:47, 13 August 2020 (UTC)
I agree described by source (P1343) does not fit particularly well. But do we want more sprecific properties to model issuer (Q780558), witness (Q196939), addressee (Q28008314) etc. ? A much more general term such as mentioned in clearly won't do here (to high a risk for abuse IMO). Perhaps FactGrid (Q90405608) could be a better starting point? --HHill (talk) 15:16, 13 August 2020 (UTC)
We have significant person (P3342) (with high potential for abuse) that could be used here. But I agree, more specific properties would be better. --Hannes Röst (talk) 16:37, 13 August 2020 (UTC)
@Hannes Röst: I think I see what you mean, but I’d like to clarify one point: you wrote “It seems there is this but this is auto-generated.” This and the other index entries are written and curated manually; their (hierarchical) structure contains information beyond basic relations like “see also” or “mentioned in”. You’re absolutely right, of course, that they’re not like e.g. entries in a biographical lexicon – and therefore wouldn’t fit very well with described by source (P1343). But they are stable identifications of persons, places (and events) and give access to the regesta …
@Vicwestric, I and other colleagues from RI just talked it through, and we’d like to work toward proposing external identifier properties for the RI indexes. Vicwestric plans to write more in depth about what we’d suggest, I think. At this point I just wanted to give an idea that – from our perspective – the indexes are more than auto-generated summaries.
[And yes, evidently, I’m also professionally involved in the RI project :)] Julian Jarosch (digicademy) (talk) 16:00, 19 August 2020 (UTC)

@Vicwestric: I have made an example item Q98380333 based on http://www.regesta-imperii.de/id/1474-01-17_1_0_13_8_0_12354_346 - do you think that contains all the information you need? There are a few questions, for example whether we should have two items here: one for the Regest and one for the document (I think that is a bit overkill). I would opt for Q98380333instance of (P31)document (Q49848) and not for Q98380333instance of (P31)Regesta (Q1933248). Best regards --Hannes Röst (talk) 21:01, 13 August 2020 (UTC)

@Hannes Röst: Thank you very much, I think that works well. We will implement that for a test set. Thank's everybody else for the input as well. We would of course also be interested in implementing more specific properties later on. Again, excuse the confusion, I'm very excited.
@Vicwestric: I suggest to do a few hundred examples and then look at which properties you are missing and we can propose these properties or find ways to use existing properties to model what you would like to model. For Q98380333 I have found that most properties that I needed were already there, but probably there would be a better way to model the people involved other than significant person (P3342). --Hannes Röst (talk) 15:08, 14 August 2020 (UTC)

@Vicwestric, Hannes Röst: Maybe I should have added (f) in my enumeration above, i.e. the Regesta about document (e). As mentioned by Hannes, this would mainly change the instance of (P31) for these. On items for documents described by source (P1343) linking to the entry about a Regesta would probably be perfect. Not sure though if doing items about (f) or (e) is better. --- Jura 07:01, 14 August 2020 (UTC)

@Vicwestric, Jura1: I have added point (f) in your list above. I am not sure if we need that really, it seems a lot to create a new item for an abstract only. I think we can use described by source (P1343)Q316838subject has role (P2868)Q1933248{{{5}}} for example. But a very detailed modelling approach would of course model the document itself and the Regesta as two different items, but that seems like overkill to me. I definitely think we should start to create items about the documents (d) themselves first since these are the items of interest and then we could decide whether its necessary to also do (f). I think you can do (d) without (f) but you cannot do (f) without (d). --Hannes Röst (talk) 15:08, 14 August 2020 (UTC)
Looks good, we also probably need a Property with external identifier and format string http://www.regesta-imperii.de/id/$1 otherwise will have lots of links to regesta-imperii.de. What do you think @Jura:? @Vicwestric: can you comment on how stable these identifiers are after "/id/" ? --Hannes Röst (talk) 19:38, 15 August 2020 (UTC)
Yes, the URIs are intended as permalinks and could be used in a property! (However, as I just (very briefly) hinted at, it might not be necessary to have if there are properties for the RI indexes.) —Julian Jarosch (digicademy) (talk) 16:17, 19 August 2020 (UTC)

Proposed change to estimated value (P8340)

Two months ago, the property estimated value (P8340) was added (see Wikidata:Property proposal/estimated value). The property seems useful, but it seems quite odd that "estimated" is included in the property name. I'd like to propose that this be changed to "value", "monetary value", or similar, and that estimated values be marked with determination method (P459)estimate (Q37113960). It seems that the original proposal discussion talked a lot about why "value" should be distinct from "price", but there was no discussion about why it should be "estimated value" rather than "value" (except for one comment suggesting the property should just be "value").

This change would allow P8340 to be used as a generic property for monetary values when a specialized property isn't available. Here's an example use case: Knuddels breach (Q98450224)penalty (P1596)fine (Q2842797)value20000 euro. The existing properties price (P2284), cost (P2130), market capitalization (P2226), net worth (P2218), etc could all be made subproperties of P8340.

I'm proposing this as a change to P8340 rather than as a new property because the change is fairly trivial and won't invalidate any existing data (i.e. any existing "estimated value" claim is also valid as a "value" claim). P8340 is just two months old and used less than 200 times. –IagoQnsi (talk) 02:22, 18 August 2020 (UTC)

@Germartin1, Dhx1, ArthurPSmith, Iwan.Aucamp, Eihel: @Tinker Bell, Nepalicoi, Bluerasberry, Jura1, ErinaSen, Hannes Röst: Pinging everyone from the original proposal discussion –IagoQnsi (talk) 02:22, 18 August 2020 (UTC)
  • I'm sure a property with the label "value" will end up with all sorts of use cases. I'd rather leave this as is. If you want to add not estimated values, please use another property. --- Jura 02:32, 18 August 2020 (UTC)

Batailles : nombre de tués [en: Battles: Number killed ]

Bonjour à tous,

Je travaille en histoire quantitative et je suis surpris de constater que le nombre de tués lors d'une bataille, figurant dans la fiche wikipedia correspondante, n'est pas répercutée dans la fiche wikidata. On peut le voir par exemple pour la bataille de la Marne (https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q190712 et https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bataille_de_la_Marne_(1914) ). Serait-il possible d'ajouter une nouvelle propriété intitulée "nombre de tués" cumulant les soldats tués (tous bords confondus) ? De nombreuses autres informations seraient intéressantes à intégrer dans wikidata : les forces en présence, les parties impliquées, l'issue, etc. Toutes choses déjà présentes dans wikipedia.

Les études quantitatives sur ces données seraient très intéressantes, notamment pour observer l'évolution de la conflictualité globale. On trouve aux pages 12 et 13 d'un hors série du monde diplomatique (atlas critique du XXe siècle) une réflexion sur ce sujet qui me semble intéressante dans la démarche mais sûrement partielle et trompeuse dans la représentation graphique offerte.

Tous les concours sont donc les bienvenus pour ouvrir de nouvelles pistes de recherche dans ce sens.

Dans l'attente de vos propositions, je vous souhaite tous une excellente soirée. [20:09, 19 August 2020‎ AbelBonnard]

English comments

User:AbelBonnard works in quantitative history and would like to see Wikidata properties for the numbers killed in a battle. For example the Wikipedia article on the w:First Battle of the Marne gives numbers of combatants, dead and wounded for all parties.

If these data were in Wikidata, it could make it easier to crowdsource valuable research. There are already w:free and open-source software packages for w:R (programming language) like "WikidataR" for accessing Wikidata from within R.

[Google translation that sounds sensible to me] @AbelBonnard: Si ces données se trouvaient sur Wikidata, cela pourrait faciliter le crowdsourcing de recherches précieuses. Il existe déjà des fr:w:Free/Libre Open Source Software pour :fr:w:R (langage) comme "WikidataR" pour accéder à Wikidata depuis R. DavidMCEddy (talk) 20:42, 19 August 2020 (UTC)

Book sources: Copac now superseded by Library Hub Discover

The Special:BookSources page links to the now-obsolete w:Copac database, and since Copac is no longer functional, searches generated from that are now dead.

Copac is now superseded by Library Hub Discover: https://discover.libraryhub.jisc.ac.uk/

The query format is really simple: to search for "whatever", the URL is https://discover.libraryhub.jisc.ac.uk/search?q=whatever

Could someone with the appropriate rights update the Book sources page to reflect this?

-- The Anome (talk) 07:54, 17 August 2020 (UTC)

What is this project for actually?

Hi people, I see so many explanations here and there for variety of things. Anyway, I think the creators failed in the most important thing: Clearly explaining What is this for and Why? I can do tons of work here and I've just started but still can't find meaning of all this. MrPanyGoff (talk) 11:43, 19 August 2020 (UTC)

it has multiple goals/purposes. the one I care about is structuring all information and providing a central canonical identifier for important entities in the world. that goal has clear value. the simplest purpose is just "fix interwiki links". BrokenSegue (talk) 12:18, 19 August 2020 (UTC)
Besides the interwiki link, I have seen few real use case of Wikidata. The most disappointing one for me is that there is no real use of table among wikipedia. For instance, a population count table for a country would be duplicated among all wiki languages. Wikidata would have helped farming new values, help maintenance and accuracy with sources. Alas, almost all wikis refuse to show a single table. So the build and update work keeps at large for each Wikis + Wikidata.... Bouzinac (talk) 12:25, 19 August 2020 (UTC)
few use cases or few uses? there's tons of use cases. why there is limited use is a hard question. there's certainly academic interest and I think more actual use outside of wikimedia is waiting on better tooling. BrokenSegue (talk) 15:28, 19 August 2020 (UTC)
Why do you think that population table is not loaded from Wikidata? There are couple of templates in ru-wiki which do this and they are quite used. --Infovarius (talk) 21:18, 20 August 2020 (UTC)
Can you give example which entity needs a central canonical identifier, as you said above, and how Wikidata do it? MrPanyGoff (talk) 20:55, 19 August 2020 (UTC)
Also, infoboxes. For example the infobox on this page gets all the data from this project.--85.58.45.179 21:38, 19 August 2020 (UTC)
(ec) One way that it's done: on the page for a Q-item, see the last entry in Tools (left sidebar if you’re viewing the page with the default skin) that is “Concept URI”. That URI (e.g. a book I was recording is http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q98473068 with “entity” not “wiki”) can be used as the subject or object of RDF (Resource Description Framework (Q54872)) statements made at other sites, not just here, and so can become part of a web of Linked Data. That might seem quite arcane (at least to me, though I suspect I'm not alone), but consider that when big companies talk about services which are “powered by” their Facebook Graph, Google Graph, Microsoft Graph, etc., they are probably working with semantic triples just like we are. But Wikidata is free and can be used by anyone. [Feel free to w:en:W:TROUT me if I got that totally wrong!] Pelagic (talk) 22:02, 19 August 2020 (UTC)
Another way of putting that is the Q-number is an internal identifier, but the Concept URI is an external one which can be linked into 3rd-party data sets. That’s one aspect of the “how”, though others may chime in with some “whys”. Pelagic (talk) 22:02, 19 August 2020 (UTC)
Another good example of the Linked Open Data concept is in the context of geographical data, consider this church here which is in OpenStreetmap and contains a link to Galluskapelle (Q29525733). This means a map can now pull a Wikipedia article in the users local language (if it exists, in this case it doesnt), further information about the object (a short description based on properties) and also links to external tools such as PCP reference number (P381) and Denkmaldatenbank Thurgau ID (P8493) where Wikidata serves as a "hub" for Linked Open Data to collect links to other collections of Open Data at one centralized location (WikiData) and guide the user to further information. --Hannes Röst (talk) 01:34, 20 August 2020 (UTC)
  • It is also one of the knowledge bases used by Siri and Alexa and Google. After about a month or two, you can see/hear new information appear there. Previous answers by Siri and Alexa that had only had birth years or death years, then have full birth dates and death dates, once corrected here. Siri and Alexa and Google have always used Wikipedia, but now there are hundreds of thousands of entries not in Wikipedia. Wikidata is able to show widely disseminated incorrect information and deprecate it. We track errors found in other knowledge bases, such as incorrect dates of birth and death. --RAN (talk) 04:20, 20 August 2020 (UTC)

my comment is not strongly related to discussion above. But it is possible that whole Lexeme part in Wikidata is redundant. No need to mirror all entries from Wiktionaries!?--Estopedist1 (talk) 04:32, 20 August 2020 (UTC)

this is a good point and I have not figured this out myself. I think the goal is rather to import Wiktionary and structure its data in a machine-readable fashion and not simply duplicate it (similar to how Wikidata does not duplicate Wikipedia). It seems that the features for wiktionary are still under development but should eventually be connected to Wikidata (currently it is discouraged to add wiktionary links to Q-items, see Wikidata:Wiktionary/Sitelinks. I think its still work in progress but if you look at pages like https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/for it becomes clear that maintaining all this data manually is difficult and also hard to parse automatically. --Hannes Röst (talk) 14:40, 20 August 2020 (UTC)

How to Add Multiple Same Values via Qualifiers?

I searched the help section but there is not explanation for this.

Example: For a statement "member of" (musical group) I have a value "Black Sabbath". So it needs a clarification in which period is that and I use Qualifiers: "start time" and "end time".

Well, how to use these Qualifiers if the musician has been a member of this group during multiple periods? You know, under Black Sabbath I need: from 1988 to 1991 / from 1996 to 1997 / and from 2005 to 2010. MrPanyGoff (talk) 17:06, 20 August 2020 (UTC)

As you allude to in the title, you can just add more statements with the same value, with only the values for the qualifiers differing. Popperipopp (talk) 17:58, 20 August 2020 (UTC)
This not working. I try it and immediately "!" mark for problems appeared. I mean, I've added "start time" and "end time" couple of times under the value "Black Sabbath". MrPanyGoff (talk) 19:23, 20 August 2020 (UTC)
Your comment seems to notice how what you're doing is slightly different from what Popperipopp suggested...? Each period needs its own statement, not a single statement with two values each for start and end. I've gone ahead and added it on Cozy Powell (Q14341) and it looks fine. (but please add a reference) --Matthias Winkelmann (talk) 19:51, 20 August 2020 (UTC)
Okay, I'm going to do it this way then. Thanks for the response. MrPanyGoff (talk) 19:55, 20 August 2020 (UTC)

URI for a particular version in a history

I'm curious if a URI can be constructed to access a particular version of a WikiData entry in its history. currently, the URIs (e.g. https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q57408490) access the current version. An older version can be obtained with a request like https://www.wikidata.org/w/index.php?title=Q57408490&oldid=922019198, but that seems pretty brittle. Is there somethign like https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q57408490/922019198 ?

steve

The one you gave is also on Special:CiteThisPage.
It can be shortened to https://www.wikidata.org/w/index.php?oldid=922019198 and w:Help:Permanent_link describes another alternative: Special:Permalink/922019198, i.e. https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Special:Permalink/922019198 --- Jura 19:41, 20 August 2020 (UTC)

Two new WikiCite grant programs

I'm very pleased to announce two new WikiCite grant programs in support of Open citations and linked bibliographic data. Apply by 1 October.

1. Project & events [$2-10k]

2. e-Scholarships [per-diem calculated on your city; 1-5 people (single, or as a 'remote group') for 2-4 days, for COVID-era "stay at home" projects. Paid in advance living allowance, no expense report required.]

There is lots of documentation, eligibility requirements, selection criteria, program design principles at those links. Please check them out. Sincerely, LWyatt (WMF) (talk) 19:31, 20 August 2020 (UTC)

Wikiversity COVID-19 Data

A user has started adding a variety of COVID-19-related data to Wikiversity. See Wikiversity:COVID-19/All-cause deaths. It seems to me that this data should be in Wikidata and accessed using some type of query rather than saved as text in Wikiversity pages. Is this a correct assumption, and if so, do you have suggestions and/or examples of how to proceed so we can achieve the same results using Wikidata for the data source? -- Dave Braunschweig (talk) 23:28, 15 August 2020 (UTC)

  • Wikidata has no position what's on topic or off-topic for Wikiversity. That's their business. ChristianKl ❪✉❫ 21:57, 16 August 2020 (UTC)
    • @ChristianKl: I'm sorry I didn't explain the question well. This isn't a question of what is on or off topic at Wikiversity. I'm a Wikiversity Bureaucrat. We have appropriateness covered. This is a question of what content is appropriate for Wikidata, and whether there are existing examples of how to load and query data like this. Your assistance and suggestions would be appreciated. -- Dave Braunschweig (talk) 15:44, 21 August 2020 (UTC)
      • @Dave Braunschweig: Wikidata does store some COVID-19 data. At Wikidata there's the listeria bot that can produce tables and charts. I'm not sure whether Wikiversity has access to a copy of the bot. If that's desired by Wikiversity, I would expect that it's no problem to have the bot work over at Wikiversity. Other people at the Wikiproject COVID-19 at Wikidata might be able to tell you more about what data we have and what might be good to import, so I will ping it:
TiagoLubiana 01:35, 16 March 2020 Daniel Mietchen 01:42, 16 March 2020 (UTC)
Jodi.a.schneider 02:45, 16 March 2020 (UTC)
Chchowmein 02:45, 16 March 2020 (UTC)
Dhx1 03:38, 16 March 2020 (UTC)
Konrad Foerstner 06:02, 16 March 2020 (UTC)
Netha Hussain 06:19, 16 March 2020 (UTC)
Bodhisattwa 06:56, 16 March 2020 (UTC)
Neo-Jay 07:04, 16 March 2020 (UTC)
John Samuel 07:31, 16 March 2020 (UTC)
KlaudiuMihaila 07:53, 16 March 2020 (UTC)
Salgo60 09:11, 16 March 2020 (UTC)
Andrawaag 10:12, 16 March 2020 (UTC)
Whidou 10:16, 16 March 2020 (UTC)
Blue Rasberry 15:07, 16 March 2020 (UTC)
TJMSmith 16:15, 16 March 2020 (UTC)
Egon Willighagen 16:49, 16 March 2020 (UTC)
Nehaoua 20:32, 16 March 2020 (UTC)
Andy Mabbett (UTC)
Peter Murray-Rust 00:00, 17 March 2020 (UTC)
Kasyap 02:45, 17 March 2020 (UTC)
Denny 16:21, 17 March 2020 (UTC)
Kwj2772 16:56, 17 March 2020 (UTC)
Joalpe 22:47, 17 March 2020 (UTC)
Finn Årup Nielsen fnielsen) 10:59, 18 March 2020 (UTC)
Skim 11:45, 18 March 2020 (UTC)
SCIdude 15:15, 18 March 2020 (UTC)
Evolution and evolvability 01:23, 20 March 2020 (UTC)
Susanna Ånäs (Susannaanas) 07:05, 20 March 2020 (UTC)
Mlemusrojas 15:30, 20 March 2020 (UTC)
Yupik 20:23, 20 March 2020 (UTC)
Csisc 23:05, 20 March 2020 (UTC)
OAnick 10:26, 21 March 2020 (UTC)
Gnoeee 12:28, 21 March 2020 (UTC)
Jjkoehorst 14:27, 21 March 2020 (UTC)
So9q 08:58, 22 March 2020 (UTC)
Nandana 14:58, 23 March 2020 (UTC)
Addshore 15:56, 23 March 2020 (UTC)
Librarian lena 18:19, 24 March 2020 (UTC)
Jelabra 19:19, 24 March 2020 (UTC)
AlexanderPico 23:34, 27 March 2020 (UTC)
Higa4 02:51, 29 March 2020 (UTC)
JoranL 19:56, 29 March 2020 (UTC)
Alejgh 11:04, 1 April 2020 (UTC)
Will (Wiki Ed)) 17:36, 1 April 2020 (UTC)
Ranjithsiji 04:47, 2 April 2020 (UTC)
AntoineLogean 07:35, 2 April 2020 (UTC)
Hannolans 17:22, 2 April 2020 (UTC)
Farmbrough 21:15, 3 April 2020 (UTC)
Ecritures 21:26, 3 April 2020 (UTC)

  Notified participants of WikiProject COVID-19 ChristianKl ❪✉❫ 17:54, 21 August 2020 (UTC)

Building creation date

I recently added a batch of municipally protected buildings for the WLM. Even after import, I am not sure how to model the three distinct creation dates of a building.

  1. Architect's drawings dated (or design period, could sometimes be the start date of the design period). I used inception (P571) with applies to part (P518) > design (Q82604)
  2. Building constructed (date or date range), or a generic creation date. I used inception (P571).
  3. Building service entry. I used service entry (P729).

I am especially interested in how you have made the distinction between cases 1 and 2. The constraints are not happy with multiple values. – Susanna Ånäs (Susannaanas) (talk) 05:52, 21 August 2020 (UTC)

I would really appreciate a dedicated property for the construction phase. Thierry Caro (talk) 12:52, 21 August 2020 (UTC)
  • Just FWIW, Commons models this poorly. Right now all we have there is "Built" categories, which are supposed to be "construction complete" and which even given that don't distinguish physical completion from start of service. I believe en-wiki has a similar problem (at least for categorization), but I haven't checked lately. - Jmabel (talk) 13:41, 21 August 2020 (UTC)
I am also in favor of 3 different properties. We will need to know how to handle current data. – Susanna Ånäs (Susannaanas) (talk) 14:36, 21 August 2020 (UTC)
Fralambert (talk) (Canada and United States)
Alicia Fagerving (WMSE) (talk) Yarl ✉️️  Spinster 💬 10:54, 6 March 2017 (UTC) Beat Estermann (talk) 09:49, 19 March 2017 (UTC) PKM (talk) Susanna Ånäs (Susannaanas) (talk) 05:57, 14 May 2017 (UTC) Acka47 (talk) 13:38, 29 June 2017 (UTC) --Carlojoseph14 (talk) 15:13, 30 June 2017 (UTC) Ainali (talk) 09:25, 17 August 2017 (UTC) VIGNERON (talk) Marsupium (talk) 14:36, 19 June 2018 (UTC) Runner1928 (talk) 15:46, 30 July 2018 (UTC) --Alexmar983 (talk) 20:48, 3 August 2018 (UTC) -- Bodhisattwa (talk) 10:04, 20 August 2018 (UTC) --Titodutta (talk) 13:01, 20 August 2018 (UTC) -- Satpal Dandiwal (talk) 02:06, 22 August 2018 (UTC) --Satdeep Gill (talk) 04:36, 22 August 2018 (UTC) --Pmlineditor (talk) 13:23, 22 August 2018 (UTC) --Rajeeb Dutta (talk) 15:17, 23 August 2018 (UTC) --Ananth subray (talk) 03:38, 24 August 2018 (UTC) --Sumanth699 (talk) 15:54, 25 August 2018 (UTC) --Ranjithsiji (talk) 08:19, 27 August 2018 (UTC) --MNavya (talk) 16:46, 27 August 2018 (UTC) Mauricio V. Genta (talk) 23:43, 1 September 2018 (UTC) Blademasterx (talk) 07:29, 3 October 2018 (UTC) Buccalon (talk) 20:35, 19 November 2018 (UTC) --Planemad (talk) 09:19, 15 December 2018 (UTC) Nizil Shah (talk) 05:23, 14 February 2019 (UTC) Ivanhercaz (Talk) 10:18, 8 June 2019 (UTC) Simon Cobb (User:Sic19 ; talk page) 16:43, 9 July 2019 (UTC) Mallikarjunasj (talk) 12:03, 16 August 2019 (UTC) --DarwIn (talk) 16:19, 25 August 2019 (UTC) --Atudu (talk) 15:59, 5 November 2019 (UTC) Arch2all (talk) 08:56, 21 January 2020 (UTC) John Samuel (talk) 21:50, 22 March 2020 (UTC) Akuckartz (talk) 11:50, 9 August 2020 (UTC) Baidax (talk) 22:34, 16 September 2020 (UTC) --Epìdosis 18:19, 3 November 2020 (UTC) Pauljmackay (talk) 16:07, 11 December 2020 (UTC) Mathieu Kappler (talk) 11:46, 6 September 2021 (UTC) dzahsh (talk) 11:46, 8 March 2022 (UTC) Wolfgang8741 (talk) 17:06, 31 March 2022 (UTC) —Ismael Olea (talk) Akbarali (talk) 07:35, 13 August 2022 (UTC) ⚊⚊ DCflyer (talk) 10:29, 17 September 2022 (UTC) Antoine2711 (talk) 07:54, 7 December 2023 (UTC) --Zache (talk) 09:00, 22 January 2024 (UTC)

  Notified participants of WikiProject Built heritage (forgot this) – Susanna Ånäs (Susannaanas) (talk) 14:40, 21 August 2020 (UTC)

Just +1'ing that I have encountered this issue many times as well, and I think it would be great to arrive at a streamlined / standardized way of modeling this. This problem also occurs in more or less similar ways with (bronze/cast) sculptures that may be 'designed' in a specific year, but then cast and inaugurated (as public art) at another date. I'd be inclined to use inception (P571) with various qualifiers. To contradict this, I think I may have used date of official opening (P1619) for public art regularly. Spinster 💬 14:52, 21 August 2020 (UTC)
Tricky question indeed. Note that inception (P571) has also aliases "date constructed", "construction", "constructed", "completed", "built". But construction of the building takes usually multiple years (and entering of a period using time datatype is a bit tricky). Also date of official opening (P1619) is widely used. Dedicated property "construction start date" may be the solution. --Jklamo (talk) 15:15, 21 August 2020 (UTC)
I only use inception for WLM as the date when the artwork or building is completed, I had no time to dig further but I wanted to know how to encode the information of the whole process of construction. I would have used "applies to part" probably, but often since I want to improve commons categorization I also create specific item for specific portion of building, so I avoided practically the issue. It is still true that a construction can take time and we don't face this need of accurate description properly. I am impressed how items such as Q191739 are for example so poorly described. Yes I can look at Q3699556 and Q1140023, but all the information should be in the main item of the complex.--Alexmar983 (talk) 17:59, 21 August 2020 (UTC)

magazine (Q41298): country (P17) or country of origin (P495)?

Model item (El Comité 1973 (Q53644712)) uses country (= P17) but I think country of origin (= P495) should be used (description: country of origin of this item (creative work, food, phrase, product, etc.)). Chrzwzcz (talk) 14:14, 14 August 2020 (UTC)

Yes. Creative work should use country of origin (P495). Thierry Caro (talk) 09:12, 15 August 2020 (UTC)
OK, thanks, and should we initiate change P17→P495 for every instance of Q41298? Chrzwzcz (talk) 10:11, 15 August 2020 (UTC)
Probably yes. --Infovarius (talk) 23:31, 20 August 2020 (UTC)
OK. Who is capable to alert all language version to initiate change in their respective templates which are using value od P17? And to make such change in wikidata? Chrzwzcz (talk) 22:00, 21 August 2020 (UTC)

Difficulty creating data items for a book

Hi, forgive my inexperience, but I hit some snags creating Sea fishes of Southern Australia (Q98472327) (work) and Sea fishes of Southern Australia (2nd edition) (Q98473068) (edition/version). Any suggestion how I could do these better?

  1. How to express the statement "Second edition 1999. Reprinted 2001, 2002, 2003, 2006, 2008, 2012". I tried significant event = reprint with years as qualifiers,[13] but that gave constraint violations. The construct [ significant event (P793): occurrence (Q1190554) (qualifiers: object has role (P3831) = reprint (Q1962297), point in time = date) ] [14] works, but is cumbersome. FRBR might have us create a third Q-item for the 2012 printing as a "realization" of the "expression"(??), but please no.
  2. Imprint on the title page recto is "Gary Allen Pty Ltd" and in the colophon verso it says "Published by Swainston Publishing and Rockpool Publishing Pty, Ltd". Property publisher (P123) requires a data item not free text, so to work around creating items for the publishers I'm tried [Publisher = unknown (Q24238356) (qual: object named as (P1932) = publisher name string)], but that's inelegant. Similarly, place served by transport hub (P931), needs another item.
  3. How to express the statement "First published December 1986"? (i.e. publication of the first printing of the first edition)

P.S. I understand the rationale for "almost everything has to be a Q-item". But it's just painful that to make a record for one book, I would need to make eight items: 1 work (Q386724), 1× version, edition or translation (Q3331189), 2× human (Q5) as objects of author (P50), and 4× organization (Q43229) as objects of publisher (P123) and copyright holder (P3931).

Pelagic (talk) 06:12, 19 August 2020 (UTC)

  • While it's great to have complete items, sometimes it's easier to start out just with the essential parts. For a reference, that could be the item for the edition with its title, year of publication, author name string and identifier. --- Jura 06:28, 19 August 2020 (UTC)
  • I would echo Jura's point, if you need this for a reference or similar you can just make the lowest level item in the chain (version, edition or translation) and in theory it should be easy enough to link to work items in future if external identifiers (ISSN, etc.) are added. --SilentSpike (talk) 13:34, 19 August 2020 (UTC)
    • Good point that an edition can exist without a work, since we duplicate author and title statements across both. And that references cite the edition not the work. Do we even need items for works, whilst there is only one edition item? Pelagic (talk) 21:04, 19 August 2020 (UTC)
    • The book's from a library and I have to return it soon. So I’d like to capture as much information as possible whilst I have it in hand. I suppose I could record that on the talk page for later reference. The way that it’s stated on the physical book itself may vary from how it’s recorded in external sources: e.g. in this case WorldCat gives the publisher as Gary Allen and doesn’t mention Swainston Publishing nor Rockpool Publishing. Pelagic (talk) 21:04, 19 August 2020 (UTC)
      I hadn’t heard of LRM (Library Reference Model) before today, but I noticed in a slide deck that it distinguishes between the “Manifestation Statement” as a string and the manifestation data as entities. Would there be interest in adding a new property that would correspond to Manifestation Statement? Pelagic (talk) 05:53, 22 August 2020 (UTC)
  • Beyond what can be found with an ISBN, it can be interesting to describe some other features of the book: cites work (P2860), acknowledged (P7137), epigraph (P7150), author of foreword (P2679), author of afterword (P2680), its front and back matter, etc. All not necessarily found elsewhere. --- Jura 10:55, 22 August 2020 (UTC)

Should featured Wikibooks have their own Wikidata items?

Should Wikibooks have their own Wikidata items? I've asked something similar before but this time I got more questions/worries. Currently most of the English Wikibooks are linking to Wikidata objects of concepts they are about instead of to the books themselves:

  • The Wikibook about Acoustics links to the concept of acoustics (Q82811)
  • The Wikibook "Ada Programming" links to the concept of the programming language Ada (Q154755)
  • The Wikibook "Algorithms" links to the computer science related concept algorithm (Q8366)
  • The Wikibook "Anatomy and Physiology of Animals" didn't have a Wikidata item so I created one. If you want you can review the Wikidata item I created, or even add it for deletion if you think I created it in error. Anatomy and Physiology of Animals (Q98538528)
  • The Wikibook "Applications of ICT in Libraries" also didn't have an item. I created Applications of ICT in Libraries (Q98538557)
  • The Wikibook about Arimaa links to the concept of Arimaa (Q238950) that it is about.
  • The Wikibook "Basic Computing Using Windows" already had a Wikidata item Basic Computing Using Windows (Q21075788) but I added some basic data to it. Please review my instance of = book, qualifier = of of = Wikibooks addition, if you agree or would prefer any modifications or deletions. Is the qualifier of or part of the correct way to go and/or should I be more specific and state English Wikibooks or is it enough with just Wikibooks as I've currently done?

I'd like your input in how the current Wikibooks with existing Wikidata items are entered into Wikidata and my new created Wikidata objects to see if I'm doing something right/wrong and what my next course of action should be. I'm usually a very unsure individual and I try to find out what the current 'state'/consensus is about a topic before I make larger scale edits.

I also have another question/comment about Wikibook chapters, which is individual chapters in a Wikibook and separate Wikidata items:

A user or a group of users(all 3 unregistered) have put and edited individual chapters(over the months/years) of the Wikibook "Anatomy and Physiology of Animals" into Wikidata. Is that proper? Different chapters in Wikidata would mean more details but maybe it would clutter the database? I know little about how 'English Wikibooks or Wikibooks in general' and Wikidata co-exist. I will refer to this from the English Wikibooks community so that I can receive input from there too. Datariumrex (talk) 07:16, 21 August 2020 (UTC)

I'm completely unaware of Wikimedia policies. I think if every Wikipedia stub has an item, Wikibook books do deserve them, no question. --SCIdude (talk) 07:43, 21 August 2020 (UTC)
  • There are probably four questions:
  1. should we link pages for books at Wikibooks from topical items (e.g. acoustics (Q82811)) or from items about the "book" (that would use main subject (P921) to link to the topical item)?
  2. should we link just "featured" books or any book?
  3. should we link pages/chapters of these books?
  4. should we link pages of these books from topical items or from items for pages/chapters of these books?
The approach for Wikisource is that distinct items are created for books there (if the edition that is available on Wikisource doesn't have one yet) and these the link with main subject (P921) elsewhere. Items are created even for articles in these books. Supposedly people only do it once the Wikisource pages are at least proofread. --- Jura 09:55, 21 August 2020 (UTC)
Looking at categories like Wikibooks' tractor lexicon pages, I suppose we could link at least these directly from topical items. Odd that they aren't in Wikipedia BTW. --- Jura 10:12, 21 August 2020 (UTC)
  • A Wikibook link is enough to create notability with our policy. The question of whether it should be a new item or an item for an existing concept is more complicated. Using items for existing concepts means that there are Wikilinks. Are those Wikilinks desired by the people over at Wikibooks? ChristianKl ❪✉❫ 18:00, 21 August 2020 (UTC)
We have bibliographic items in Wikidata for printed books; we should have them for Wikibooks also. With respect to sitelinks, the links from, say, w:en:Acoustics to wikibook(s) about acoustics can be handled in the External Links section of the article. We needn’t rely on a data item to bind them. If sitelinks could handle multiple pages per site, it might be a different kettle of fish. Pelagic (talk) 07:17, 22 August 2020 (UTC)
I think both positions would be okay, but I would prefer to listen to the Wikibooks community and not make this decision without their input. I don't know where the best venue for asking the community happens to be. Maybe someone who knows their channels better can open a discussion? ChristianKl ❪✉❫ 13:47, 22 August 2020 (UTC)

Trouble with Vatican Library ID property

I just went to add this property: Vatican Library ID (former scheme) (P1017) to this record: Elina Katainen (Q61352398) -- I found that neither the regex nor the formatter URL seems to be correct or functioning properly.

The formatter URL includes a link to archive.org, so not a current website: https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://viaf.org/processed/BAV%7C$1

That seems like a problem all on its own. Neither of the samples included work, with or without the archive.org prefix.

The actual URL that works for me to get to the Vatican Library ID record on VIAF is: http://viaf.org/processed/BAV%7C495_183441 which does not match the format constraint in the regex for Vatican Library ID (former scheme) (P1017): ADV[1-9]\d{7}

I'm not sure what to do with this, but it doesn't seem right. -Kenirwin (talk) 17:36, 22 August 2020 (UTC)

@Kenirwin: The Vatican Library just recently migrated their IDs in VIAF. I just added it as Vatican Library VcBA ID (P8034), which should be used for similarly formatted things in the future. I just added a note to the property description about that. Vahurzpu (talk) 19:11, 22 August 2020 (UTC)
@Vahurzpu: -- thanks so much! -Kenirwin (talk) 19:30, 22 August 2020 (UTC)

Scientific papers help

Hi all,

I'm start to conduct a new GLAM, the idea is to digitalise Scientific papers.

Even after seeing a lot of scientific papers described here, I do not know how:

  • Abstract
How to include they?

This is important for scientific articles, and yes, I know, is not so much a data, however, it is important.

  • Bibliography
How to include they as plain text?

The Bibliography, I understand that would be nice to have a new entry for all of it, but, every article have around 30 references, and a great part of it, the Institution do not have the even ISNN, so create a new entry for it, would make the project impossible to accomplish, and loose this information seems not close to good.


Thank you :*

Rodrigo Tetsuo Argenton (talk) 21:19, 7 August 2020 (UTC)

I don't think it will be possible to include the abstract here. If the paper is in the public domain (or a suitable free licence), it can be placed on Wikisource and then a Wikidata item can link to it. If the paper is not in the public domain or available under a free licence, it will be a copyright violation to place the abstract on any Wikimedia site. From Hill To Shore (talk) 21:50, 7 August 2020 (UTC)

Announcing WikiProject Gazetteer

I am annoyed that many Wikipedia articles and Wikidata entities for places and towns contain outdated population and area statistics. While many users add this information to Wikidata entities the quality and up-to-dateness of the available data varies widely, limiting its use. A team can better maintain this important data, therefore I am starting the WikiProject Gazetteer. If you add population data to items, use this in information in Wikipedia and other projects or just want to improve Wikidata, please join the project. --Pyfisch (talk) 09:59, 23 August 2020 (UTC)

  • Do they contain these numbers unqualified by date? - Jmabel (talk) 16:37, 23 August 2020 (UTC)
    • All population numbers have a qualifier indicating the date the data was collected by authorities. Surface areas remain largely unchanged unless administrative borders are redrawn , they are still qualified by the date (or sometimes year) they were computed. --Pyfisch (talk) 18:22, 23 August 2020 (UTC)

column shrine (Q12661150) / wayside shrine (Q3395121)

Because of different naming conventions and culture, there are mixed various types of shrines. Now user ŠJů moved czech, slovak and german siteling and description from wayside shrine (Q3395121) to column shrine (Q12661150). Now there are about 2400 objects with incorrect instance of (P31) for Czech Republic (Q213).

  1. Can any bot replace Q3395121 to Q12661150 for them (without changing references)?
  2. There are also 3600 items in Germany and 2700 in Austria which were affected by this changes too - Can any native speaker check it? JAn Dudík (talk) 12:09, 23 August 2020 (UTC)

Gregorian years

Which class better to use: calendar year (Q3186692) or year (Q577)? Both are widely used. But I suppose it should be Gregorian year (Q39628023). Opinions? --Infovarius (talk) 21:14, 20 August 2020 (UTC)

I guess it depends on "... for what?" But assuming it's a specific year, like "2020", I would agree that it should be Gregorian year (Q39628023). year (Q577) is out right away, as it's about the unit of measurement.
Going a step further, part of me wants to relabel the latter two to just "year". "Calendar year" and "gregorian year" are just disambiguations, and in violation of Help:Label#Reflect_common_usage since neither term sees any significant use in reality, where people just write and say "year". But I realize this is sort-of my obsession and it would lead to confusion with how the interface currently works. --Matthias Winkelmann (talk) 12:43, 22 August 2020 (UTC)
...and, two days later, I come across proleptic Gregorian calendar (Q1985727). I really wish we had a way to use the "intuitive" item in these cases where they make up 99%+ of uses. --Matthias Winkelmann (talk) 23:22, 23 August 2020 (UTC)

name day

Hello. With name day (P1750) we add the day of the year associated with a first/given name. But, there some name days that connected with moveable feast (Q1825417). For example, Lambros (Q98545207) is associated with Easter (Q21196). Or, Nefeli (Q81907568) is associated with Feast of the Ascension (Q51638). How can we add that information? Data Gamer play 17:37, 23 August 2020 (UTC)

@Data Gamer: I suspect you should simply set the relevant feast day as the value, as with Velitchko (Q98069910) (I'm not entirely sure whether that one should be Easter Sunday (Q1512337) instead, or how to best note that it's specifically Orthodox Easter, but those are slightly separate questions). Such values will give a constraint warning, but that suggests the constraint should probably be adjusted to accommodate movable name days. --Oravrattas (talk) 06:14, 24 August 2020 (UTC)

Change official website (P856) of /pol/ (Q39045417)

Hi, I wanted to change this URL, just to change the URL scheme from http:// to https:// (both work, but I think whenever both work we ought to prefer the second). However, my attempt to do so was blocked by this error message: "The text you wanted to save was blocked by the spam filter. This is probably caused by a link to a blacklisted external site. The following text is what triggered our spam filter: 4channel.org". I wonder, is some admin able to make this change then? Mr248 (talk) 08:01, 24 August 2020 (UTC)

enwiki-user wanted

Please, look into Category:Articles containing Guarani-language text (Q32609094) and Category:Articles containing Guarani-language text (Q15055856). My guess is that they can be merged, as soon as enwiki has decided to merge their pages. 62 etc (talk) 10:05, 18 August 2020 (UTC)

Webroot warning for Wikidata

Webroot Filtering Extension, a browser plugin that's part of "Webroot SecureAnywhere Endpoint Protection" (and probably other Webroot Inc. (Q4845397) products), is flagging Wikidata as "Caution", with the message "The site may contain content that could affect your online security." Wikipedia, Wikisource, and Commons all show as "Trusted".

I know we can't do much about every Tom, Dick, and Harry antivirus vendor, but it's not a good look for us. Has anybody encountered issues with other products? (often they work from a common set of reputation lists)

https://www.brightcloud.com/tools/url-ip-lookup.php says "1 infections (past 12 months)"; I have made a submissionfor review at [15]

I have a screenshot; not sure the best way to share it here.

Pelagic (talk) 04:07, 19 August 2020 (UTC)

"it's not a good look for us." => to me this says its not a good look for them to report Wikidata. --Hannes Röst (talk) 01:07, 20 August 2020 (UTC)
  • It's currently showing as "no infections past 12 months" and "Trustworthy (81 of 100)", so it looks like they've reviewed it. Wonder what they thought the problem was. Andrew Gray (talk) 16:42, 24 August 2020 (UTC)

Wikidata's 8th birthday - October 29th

 
Wikidata's 8th birthday logo

Hello all,

As every year, the end of October is the moment where we celebrate Wikidata's anniversary, the work of the contributors and get together as a community :)

Some people are already planning birthday events (most of them taking place online). If you're interested in organizing a meetup, live-stream, etc. feel free to have a look at the details here, and to add the event into the calendar. We will run a meetup for organizers, we provide a digital communication kit (including a cool CC0 logo generator) and you can also find information about funding. We are also running an experiment with a 24-hours call where people can join at anytime that is convenient for them in their own time zone.

The Wikidata birthday is also the occasion to prepare presents, for example new tools, scripts, improvements on an existing project, but also non-code gifts. These will be added there, and you can get inspired by the previous years: 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016...

If you have any questions regarding the Wikidata birthday and especially distributed events, feel free to contact me. Cheers, Lea Lacroix (WMDE) (talk) 09:50, 24 August 2020 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #430

 
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Tool of the week
    • Sophox allows for SPARQL querying of Wikidata and OpenStreetMap in a single query
  • Other Noteworthy Stuff
    • Two new grant programs from WikiCite, in support of open citations and linked bibliographic data.
Full documentation, eligibility requirements, selection criteria, program design principles, and contacts at the links. Apply by 1 October.
  1. Project & events [$2-10k]
  2. e-Scholarships [per-diem calculated on your city; 1-5 people (single, or as a 'remote group') for 2-4 days, for COVID-era "stay at home" projects. Paid in advance living allowance, no expense report required.]
  • Development
    • Deployed the first version of the Wikidata Bridge to Catalan Wikipedia
    • Creating Grafana Dashboards for the new Wikidata Bridge so we have some data to help us determine which datatypes to support next for example (phabricator:T260532)
    • Finished working on ensuring Labels of Items in some unusual, often minority, languages are still available on Wikipedia and other clients (phabricator: T259340)
    • Fixed error messages for API modules that will not work with the first version of Federated Properties (phabricator:T258558)
    • Working on improving how ORES judges the quality of an Item to make it more accurate
    • Started coding on Automated Configuration Discovery to make it easier for tool builders to make their tools work for other Wikibase instances as well

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here. If you want to help, you can also have a look at the tasks needing a volunteer.



How to handle incorrect incorrect data cited from VIAF

I am quite certain that https://www.wikidata.org/w/index.php?title=Q33111920&diff=685085380&oldid=685085375 is the insertion of a false statement (which has now stood for over 2 years), but I don't know whether to deprecate or delete it, and whether there is something we need to do to inform someone if VIAF has inaccurate data. I am not sure of a correct date of birth for Evelyn McDonnell (Q33111920) but it would astound me if she were born before 1960, and I'd guess a few years after that. I followed up to VIAF and see nothing there at present indicating the claimed 1950 date of birth (nor any other date of birth), but I may not know where to look. - Jmabel (talk) 00:00, 25 August 2020 (UTC)

The claim is hiding in the VIAF > Record views > VIAF Cluster in XML section (search for "birth" or "1950" once the XML page loads). I can't see where the claim has come from, so I have deprecated it for the moment with reason for deprecated rank (P2241) not been able to confirm this claim (Q21655367). From Hill To Shore (talk) 00:50, 25 August 2020 (UTC)
How about this: [16], "Born to suburban bohemians in Milwaukee the year the Beatles played Ed Sullivan's show". However, a reference that Wikipedia uses, [17], says "born in the Los Angeles suburb of Glendale", but also a high school graduation date which is consistent. Ghouston (talk) 00:55, 25 August 2020 (UTC)
I can't see the second link as it is geoblocked for parts of Europe due to our dataprotection laws. If the first source is accurate, that would put her date of birth as sometime in 1964. After further digging at VIAF, the 1950 date is coming from 3 records (see line 997); Wikidata, BNF and National Library of Israel. Deprecating the incorrect date here should remove our claim at VIAF and eventually migrate through the data network, depending on how quickly the other sites review and update their records (this might be a fairly slow process as every other data source has recorded "unknown" for several years and we are only now picking up on the error). However, if we are able to insert a sourced and corrected date alongside the deprecated date, that is more likely to propogate across the network to the more regularly updated authority IDs. From Hill To Shore (talk) 01:19, 25 August 2020 (UTC)
The second article is archived at [18]. I have some doubts given that the articles disagree about the place of birth. The original version of the first is at [19] and dates from 2006; at least it's a citation, and perhaps 1964 is correct. Ghouston (talk) 01:45, 25 August 2020 (UTC)
The Beatles also appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show in 1965, so the date is only circa. Ghouston (talk) 01:59, 25 August 2020 (UTC)

Undoin accidental mass creation of blank items

also posted to User_talk:Magnus_Manske I've accidentally created several hundred blank items (see contrib history). Is there a way to undo these? Apologies for the error! T.Shafee(evo&evo) (talk) 06:11, 24 August 2020 (UTC)

All removed. —MisterSynergy (talk) 09:11, 24 August 2020 (UTC)
Why not to re-use them? --Infovarius (talk) 15:07, 25 August 2020 (UTC)
there's no risk of running out of numbers. BrokenSegue (talk) 15:21, 25 August 2020 (UTC)

Kiseki Himura (Q27204966) check gender

Hi, can anyone please check for this Japanese illustrator if they are male or female? The authority data says both. --Pyfisch (talk) 09:10, 25 August 2020 (UTC)

The Japanese Wikipedia article says they are male, and uses the gender information in their own Pixiv profile [20] as the reference. --Stevenliuyi (talk) 09:43, 25 August 2020 (UTC)
Thank you! I set male to preferred status and added his profile as a source. --Pyfisch (talk) 10:28, 25 August 2020 (UTC)

Tamil Lexemes

Hi

I need a help on Lexeme...how to add form in Tamil and what is the equivalent form of various Tamil words lexeme....

For example : if I add a form like அம்மாவுக்கு in Tamil how can I easily identify the form name in Tamil ...can anyone send me list of it Aarlin Raj A (talk) 17:35, 23 August 2020 (UTC)


Tamil (Q5885) doesn't have any of these properties.
This query gives a few "grammatical features" already in use on lexemes for the language, but not all seem sensible (to someone without any knowledge of the language) . --- Jura 09:03, 26 August 2020 (UTC)

Difference between Wikipedia and wikidata

Hello

My name is Madonna Onwuka I am from Africa.Nigeria is my country . I am ten years old.I am the PRO of Wikidata and Wikipedia.

So about what I want to say is Why Wikipedia page is different from wikidata page .

Wikipedia page is something like a media that help's either kids or adults to learn and browse things that they do not know. 

                                     While wikidata page is a media where people learn of the economic, politics, Presidents, Governor and so on.

So as the PRO of Wikidata and Wikipedia page. I want to say thank you 💖 for reading my note . Thanks again and God loves you 💖 💖💖💖 So many hearts sorry. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 105.112.108.26 (talk) 11:02, 25 August 2020 (UTC)

  • @105.112.108.26: Hi Madonna! Welcome to Wikidata, we're so glad you're learning about Wikipedia and Wikidata. Your description of Wikpedia is eactly correct. On Wikipedia, there are many, many articles about almost every topic that we could want to learn about. On the other hand, Wikidata is all about connecting topics together in a way that is easy for computers to process. It is intended to be "behind-the-scenes," helping to make Wikipedia more useful. Wikidata does include a lot of information about economics and politics, but also includes animals, science, mathematics, music, art, bussiness. Almost anything you can think of! Most people spend more time reading Wikipedia, but personally I enjoy seeing how all the items on Wikidata are connected together, and also helping to add more connections! (I work a lot on mathematics pages). Do you have a favorite thing to learn about on Wikipedia/Wikidata? The-erinaceous-one (talk) 04:26, 26 August 2020 (UTC)

How do I define multilingual for a name or something else?

Till yesterday it was done by adding "mul". Today this no longer works. Please advise. Thanks and cheers --[[kgh]] (talk) 07:15, 26 August 2020 (UTC)

Ah, ok the data constraints for last names were changed. Got it. Thanks. --[[kgh]] (talk) 07:17, 26 August 2020 (UTC)

Sculpture

What is sculpture (Q17310537) about and how does it relate to art of sculpture (Q11634) and plastic arts (Q1078913)? The English label and description aren't very informative and I can't understand much of its German Wikipedia article at de:Bildhauerei. Ghouston (talk) 05:49, 22 August 2020 (UTC)

@Ghouston: From what I can tell, in German the latter two are commonly used as synonyms, but technically one is built by addition, and the other by subtraction (it's certainly possible that the links or properties are not consistent across other languages). The German article behind Q17310537 seems to suggest that it's more about the activity of sculpture (L42041: sculpting), rather than the output (L42042-S1: a sculpture) or the field of art that encompasses those (L42042-S2: sculpture). --Oravrattas (talk) 07:18, 22 August 2020 (UTC)
Thanks for the attempt. We already have an item for the finished works, sculpture (Q860861), with its article de:Skulptur, but maybe the extra item could be converted to "additive sculpture", or something. Ghouston (talk) 07:57, 22 August 2020 (UTC)
"Plastic art" seems to be sometimes used as a synonym for "visual arts", but sometimes only the 3D subset, but which can be more inclusive than "sculpture", by including ceramics etc., some of the "additive" crafts. Ghouston (talk) 08:01, 22 August 2020 (UTC)
In the German article it states that "Der Begriff Bildhauerei kann ebenfalls die Bildhauerkunst als Gattung bezeichnen, er bezieht sich aber eher auf den handwerklichen oder beruflichen Aspekt der Tätigkeit. Bildnerei ist eine veraltete Bezeichnung für die Bildhauerkunst.[3] " -> which basically states that sculpture (Q17310537) relates to the profession and craft while art of sculpture (Q11634) relates to the artistic aspect. Therefore sculpture (Q17310537)instance of (P31)craft (Q2207288) and art of sculpture (Q11634)instance of (P31)art genre (Q1792379) if that makes sense but the two terms are closely related, not sure if the distinction exists in other languages. sculpture (Q860861) is the product of the subtractive technique and plastic arts (Q1078913) the product of the additive technique (at least in German), but this distinction has been widely lost in common language but is used in academia to differentiate the two. There is of course also art foundry (Q1792400), bronze casting (Q928402) and iron art foundry (Q98380324) to produce 3D objects which are also called sculpture (Q860861). Best --Hannes Röst (talk) 14:56, 22 August 2020 (UTC)
Thanks. I'll take another look at it some time: if I can't work out a subclass relationship between different variants of sculptures or sculpting, I'll just make them subclasses of something like "visual arts" or "artworks". Ghouston (talk) 00:23, 24 August 2020 (UTC)
This isn't directly related to the question at hand, but there is an un-resolved question about how to handle bronze sculptures with multiple casts here. -Animalparty (talk) 02:42, 24 August 2020 (UTC)
@Animalparty: reading the discussion above, I think this is a similar relation as book editions or prints, eg On the Origin of Species (Q20124) to On the Origin of Species (Q20968204) which is modelled with has edition or translation (P747) and edition or translation of (P629). However, I dont think that an equivalent property exists for print (Q11060274) and cast etc. I think there should be a more general property as these are all methods where a template is made and then multiple instances are generated from the template. I would support the creation of such a property.What do you think? --Hannes Röst (talk) 15:10, 26 August 2020 (UTC)

en-WP discussion on whether to migrate college color data to Wikidata

Many of you may have seen this already, but for anyone who hasn't and who might be interested, there is a discussion at English Wikipedia's Village Pump about whether to host college official color data at Wikipedia or Wikidata. See w:Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)#Migrate college color data to Wikidata. {{u|Sdkb}} talk 18:37, 25 August 2020 (UTC)

it's very disappointing to see how suspicious enwiki users are of wikidata even for such trivial use cases. BrokenSegue (talk) 02:04, 26 August 2020 (UTC)
Some wikis just use Wikidata when no other information is available.
So beyond, setting up support for Wikidata properties, not much needs to be "migrated".
Once this is in sync with local data, one could decide where values should be maintained going forward. --- Jura 09:22, 26 August 2020 (UTC)
Has anybody involved started a property proposal for this? I assume there isn't an existing property that works. Do enwiki people think they can just dump whatever they want here without discussion? ( :)) I did think we had a property relating to the standard uniform colors of sports teams, which is I guess related, but I can't find that at the moment. ArthurPSmith (talk) 17:14, 26 August 2020 (UTC)
They've pointed to Q2892868#P6364 as an example at en:Module talk:College color#Proposal: Migrate to Wikidata. Not sure whether this is already sufficient for their needs, but maybe there isn't anything to propose. —MisterSynergy (talk) 18:06, 26 August 2020 (UTC)
Ah, I didn't know about official color (P6364), that does seem suitable. ArthurPSmith (talk) 19:04, 26 August 2020 (UTC)

There are 901 templates in w:en:Category:Latest stable software release templates. Visite fortuitement prolongée (talk) 20:29, 26 August 2020 (UTC)

Important: maintenance operation on September 1st

Read this message in another language • Please help translate to your language

The Wikimedia Foundation will be testing its secondary data centre. This will make sure that Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia wikis can stay online even after a disaster. To make sure everything is working, the Wikimedia Technology department needs to do a planned test. This test will show if they can reliably switch from one data centre to the other. It requires many teams to prepare for the test and to be available to fix any unexpected problems.

They will switch all traffic to the secondary data centre on Tuesday, September 1st 2020.

Unfortunately, because of some limitations in MediaWiki, all editing must stop while the switch is made. We apologize for this disruption, and we are working to minimize it in the future.

You will be able to read, but not edit, all wikis for a short period of time.

  • You will not be able to edit for up to an hour on Tuesday, September 1st. The test will start at 14:00 UTC (15:00 BST, 16:00 CEST, 10:00 EDT, 19:30 IST, 07:00 PDT, 23:00 JST, and in New Zealand at 02:00 NZST on Wednesday September 2).
  • If you try to edit or save during these times, you will see an error message. We hope that no edits will be lost during these minutes, but we can't guarantee it. If you see the error message, then please wait until everything is back to normal. Then you should be able to save your edit. But, we recommend that you make a copy of your changes first, just in case.

Other effects:

  • Background jobs will be slower and some may be dropped. Red links might not be updated as quickly as normal. If you create an article that is already linked somewhere else, the link will stay red longer than usual. Some long-running scripts will have to be stopped.
  • There will be code freezes for the week of September 1st, 2020. Non-essential code deployments will not happen.

This project may be postponed if necessary. You can read the schedule at wikitech.wikimedia.org. Any changes will be announced in the schedule. There will be more notifications about this. Please share this information with your community.

Trizek (WMF) (talk) 13:48, 26 August 2020 (UTC)

Why is OCLC work ID (P5331) limited to written works?

Hello, I am new to Wikidata and would like to use an OCLC work ID (P5331) on an item for a film (Ed's Coed (Q97924973)). However, I am getting an error message saying that "Entities using the OCLC work ID property should be instances of written work (Q47461344) (or of a subclass of it)." The work ID I want to use seems fine to me (http://experiment.worldcat.org/entity/work/data/476092432), although the link from Wikidata wants to go to OCLC's Classify service, which doesn't bring anything up (http://classify.oclc.org/classify2/ClassifyDemo?owi=476092432). The largest percentage of things in OCLC WorldCat certainly are books, but there are also substantial numbers of audiovisual materials, all of which also get work IDs. Is there a reason why the domain for OCLC work ID isn't something broader like creative work (Q17537576)?  – The preceding unsigned comment was added by Wiki joho (talk • contribs) at 21:47, 24 August 2020 (UTC).

I am not an expert on OCLC and Worldcat but ID properties have to consist of a common url root that will work when the ID reference is inserted at the end, which causes a valid page to open. If a datasource has information stored in various different html trees, it is difficult to find a common url that will work for all branches of their database. If you can find a common root url that works for both the existing IDs and the new IDs you want to use, then we can have a discussion about altering the root url stored on the property (if the proposal is accepted, this would probably mean updating thousands of existing IDs to be compatible with the new root). Alternatively, if that is going to be too disruptive or there isn't a common url root, you can instead propose a new property for a second OCLC ID. One ID will be used with the existing database branch (written works) and the other will be used with the films or other items that share another common url root. From Hill To Shore (talk) 22:55, 24 August 2020 (UTC)
I think I have inadvertently conflated 2 questions: What should the domain for OCLC work ID (P5331) be? and What should the URI structure for OCLC work ID (P5331) be? There are 3 options listed under formatter URL (P1630) for OCLC work ID (P5331):
On https://www.oclc.org/developer/develop/linked-data/worldcat-entities/worldcat-work-entity.en.html, OCLC gives the example http://worldcat.org/entity/work/id/2283978583 so I wonder if that isn't a better form to use. I don't think whether or not the Classify link works depends on what kind of thing the work is, but rather on whether any library has added a classification number to one of the records that's part of the work cluster. Classify works for more popular films (http://classify.oclc.org/classify2/ClassifyDemo?owi=3834842226), but not for my original example (http://classify.oclc.org/classify2/ClassifyDemo?owi=476092432). That said, some of the worldcat.org links inexplicably fail. The film that worked in Classify errors out (http://experiment.worldcat.org/entity/work/data/3834842226) while my original example works fine (http://worldcat.org/entity/work/id/476092432). I have written to OCLC to ask if they know why some of their links are failing.
--Wiki joho (talk) 17:46, 25 August 2020 (UTC)
I'll start off with a quick explanation of what the Wikidata record is showing you. OCLC work ID (P5331) has a field for formatter URL (P1630) but this contains three values. On the left of each value is a symbol with an up arrow, a circle and then a down arrow; this is the rank indicator. If the down arrow is shaded grey, that means the entry is invalid and has been deprecated (in this case none of the three are deprecated, so all are valid options for the URL). If the circle is shaded grey, that means the entry has a normal rank (default position for new entries) and no special action will be applied. If the up arrow has been shaded grey, that entry has been given the preferred rank; this means that any system that needs to use a single value will retrieve the preferred answer and ignore the "normal rank" answers. In this case, http://classify.oclc.org/classify2/ClassifyDemo?owi=$1 has been given preferred rank, so will be used each time you click on an OCLC ID link.
In terms of further discussion about OCLC, I can't help you much as I have not delved into the data to any significant degree. You may want to ping some of the users who participated in Wikidata:Property proposal/OCLC work id as they may have a view on amending the existing preferred URL or setting up a new property. From Hill To Shore (talk) 01:44, 26 August 2020 (UTC)
Thank you for the info. OCLC has confirmed that OCLC work ID (P5331) should not be limited to written works. They are going to work out with Wikidata what needs to be updated and take care of it.
Wiki joho (talk) 00:25, 27 August 2020 (UTC)

Dennis, Stephen Christopher, 1958-1974 (Spirit)

I came across two similar items: Stephen Christopher Dennis (Q94654473) and Stephen Christopher Dennis (Q94654471), both apparently for a person called Stephen Christopher Dennis, with the latter about his spirit? The data is obviously from [21] and [22]. Can someone please explain to me what this means? --Pyfisch (talk) 12:44, 26 August 2020 (UTC)

Those are both subject records. In her book Stephen Lives! Anne Puryear recorded conversations with the spirit of her late son Stephen Christopher Dennis (a large part of the book), as well as writing about his life. It does seem prudent to have two subject records here: some people would question whether the spirit character in this book really existed and therefore it seems as though this is not quite identical with the living Stephen who undoubtedly existed. — Levana Taylor (talk) 14:08, 26 August 2020 (UTC)
I have linked them with said to be the same as (P460); someone may want to elaborate further on the relationship. - Jmabel (talk) 15:26, 26 August 2020 (UTC)
On second thought, I think the two records should be merged. If Puryear writes about Dennis and also says that he spoke to her after his death, no matter if you don't believe her, it's no different than if there's an apocryphal story about another biographical character -- if I say I went scuba diving in Hawaii with Eleanor Roosevelt (which absolutely did not happen) would you say that I'm not talking about the Eleanor Roosevelt who has an item here, but some other Eleanor-Roosevelt-who-went-scuba-diving? No. — Levana Taylor (talk) 19:35, 26 August 2020 (UTC)
@Levana Taylor: That's a poor analogy, because we don't make up items for one person's idle remarks, and we do for characters in books. Similarly, if someone inaccurately referred to Abraham Lincoln as the 12th president of the United States rather than the 16th, we don't need a special item for Lincoln-12. However, if someone creates a sufficiently notable and sufficiently fictional Lincoln, e.g. the central character of Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter (Q2648546), there may be a reason for an item distinct from Abraham Lincoln (Q91); for example, if we wanted to indicate that Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter (Q587707) uses the character from Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter (Q2648546). Not probably needed in this case, since it is directly a film from a book, but consider if it used that fictional Lincoln in a somewhat different context.
Similarly, here, if someone wanted to ascribe a quotation, it would matter whether it came from the actual or the fictional Stephen. - Jmabel (talk) 23:24, 26 August 2020 (UTC)

Property to use when describing the methods and equipment used in a scholarly publication?

Including here in case anyone interested. Please answer over at WikiProject Source MetaData

Are there existing properties to state the methods and equipment used in scientific publications, or are new ones needed? For example the publication Q27643422, uses the method Molecular replacement (Q17104122) and used the equipment Advanced Photon Source (Q2825375) (but clearly neither are a main subject (P921)). Eventually I'd like to see the mothods and equipment used for all publications listed in their Wikidata items. T.Shafee(evo&evo) (talk) 10:47, 25 August 2020 (UTC)

Why do you want to add this level of detail to an item about a paper? -Animalparty (talk) 14:26, 25 August 2020 (UTC)
  • Let's say someone is knowledgeable about a given method, they could easily retrieve all papers using that method and, e.g., find that some study used all over the planet to justify school closures was somewhat flawed in its application.
I think it's actually more useful than then names of co-authors #11 through #2000.--- Jura 14:37, 25 August 2020 (UTC)
Yes, for example: one can imagine asking the question: What papers have published using a technique now revealed to give misleading results? Find me papers with the same topic using different methods to see if the findings are still supported. Or chart the evolution of a technique being used to investigate new main subjects (e.g. NMR being used to calculate the structure of larger and larger proteins). T.Shafee(evo&evo) (talk) 23:36, 26 August 2020 (UTC)
Note: Over at Source MetaData, someone brought up describes a project that uses (P4510), which looks like a good fit. T.Shafee(evo&evo) (talk) 12:02, 27 August 2020 (UTC)

Question about persons' Item Description

Hello friends, I have a quick question: Is there a policy that states whether or not an Item's Description for a deceased person must include their dates of birth and death, like for example, Jazz musician (1900-1950)? Thank you. History DMZ (talk) 13:38, 26 August 2020 (UTC)

  • Thank you for your helpful explanation Animalparty (and ChristianKl). I agree with you that adding the dob/dod is useful for disambiguation purposes. But you bring a good point, whether it also warrants a blanket approach, I have no answer yet. Cordially, History DMZ (talk) 13:47, 27 August 2020 (UTC)

Royal Observatory Former Great Equatorial Building (Q17527527) seems to be confused about whether it's a building or telescope

Fram pointed out the item as one that produces problems on Wikidata as it lists telescope type as building. This seems undesireable so we should split the item into one for the building and one for the telescope on the building. ChristianKl ❪✉❫ 15:12, 26 August 2020 (UTC)

can't it be both? the building is a telescope. it's hard to distinguish the two. BrokenSegue (talk) 19:27, 26 August 2020 (UTC)
The Wikipedia article en:Greenwich 28 inch refractor is about a specific telescope installed in the building, which already existed. It shouldn't be too hard to split. Nothing in Wikidata links to it. Ghouston (talk) 00:47, 27 August 2020 (UTC)
Splitting the Commons category c:Category:28-inch telescope, Royal Observatory, Greenwich would help. Ghouston (talk) 00:48, 27 August 2020 (UTC)
Split to a new item Greenwich 28-inch refractor (Q98686834) - I moved the Commons and Wikipedia links and copied anything that applies to both the telescope and the building. Peter James (talk) 13:59, 27 August 2020 (UTC)

How wikidata and Wikipedia page changed my life

Hello

My name is Madonna Onwuka, I am from Africa, Nigeria, owerri, IMO State. I am the PRO of Wikidata and Wikipedia. As well I am a ten years old.

I want to say thank you to wikidata page for changing my life. It inspired me into being an amazing artist by teaching me things I don't know.I also want to say thank you to Wikipedia also Thank you and God bless you

Amen Madonna Onwuka Ogochukwu Annamarie .

Kamala Harris (Q10853588)'s middle name

(I moved this from the discussion above, as Jura wishes not to not mix multiple issue, and also quote his comment from the Talk page to consolidate everything in one location)

Jura1 recently added a statement Kamala Harris (Q10853588)given name (P735)Iyer (Q98382045)reason for deprecated rank (P2241)amendment (Q1269627)section, verse, paragraph, or clause (P958)"Birth Certificate: State File Number 64-295984 , Local Registration District and Certificate Number 6015 15318". I removed it, as explained in more detail on the talk page. I still don't know if this birth certificate is authentic. But I do know that Google has a total of 15 results, which are exclusively spammy alt-right conspiracy sites. And, in the top three spots: Wikidata, huwiki and ruwiki. Go figure! --Matthias Winkelmann (talk) 22:29, 15 August 2020 (UTC)

I haven't seen any claims that the certificate is made up. The certificate has two pages: the second page shows the middle name. Whether that is a name change in California or not, I don't really know. :As I added the same reference to multiple claims, should they all be changed? :To avoid that it get's re-added and re-deleted, please restore it and set the appropriate ranks, You can add possibly invalid entry requiring further references (Q35779580) as reason for deprecation. Contrary to Wikipedia, Wikidata just provides references, not an appreciation of well fitting, ill fitting, news reporting and intentions.

Quote of Jura's comment at Talk:Q10853588

You still haven't provided any source for that statement. Not a single reputable source for this "birth certificate" can be found.
On enwiki, its inclusion has been denied. Quoting ValarianB: "After some research, this notion of an alternate middle name appears in no other source. The birth certificate image alone is not verifiable and thus is not credible.".
I cannot set appropriate references, because there aren't any. And in the absence of reputable sources, the information should not be included. Your logic would mean we should add crocodile (Q2535664) to every human (Q5) on the basis of someone tweeting "most humans are actually crocodiles".
I also don't understand why you are unwilling to disclose your source? The numbers look very authoritative, but as of right now, google finds not one source that isn't your edits here for these numbers. You probably did not go the courthouse and inspected the original certificate, meaning there should be a link to wherever you picked this up. That would at least allow us to assess the credibility of whoever makes this claim.
Here is a fact check on this issue by Reuters, showing how it is being used for "birtherism"-style conspiracy theories. Apart from people misreading it, Reuters clearly states that the image's authenticity is questionable: "The posts are accompanied by an image purportedly of Harris’s birth certificate. Reuters has contacted Harris to ask whether this image is an authentic reproduction of her birth certificate, and this check will be updated accordingly."
None of this rises above the most standard, long-established rules on sourcing information, both here and on wikipedia. This being a living person, the name being connected to hot-button issues such as her ethnicity, and her being very much at the center of lots of controversy, the requirements for verifiability should be at their highest. I'm somewhat baffled that this is somehow controversial.
That you added it as a reference for a bunch of statements is in no way an argument to lower standards for its truthfulness! It makes it even more important to get it right. It's also not like it would be hard to find a reputable source for her DOB.
I'm removing it again. I'm hoping for some third opinions here. In the meantime, the principle should be one of caution, because the stakes are asymetrical: the damage from not including some detail that nobody else is claiming anyway is just about zero, while the damage of being used to launder false information is significant, both to the person in question and WD's reputation. --Matthias Winkelmann (talk) 22:46, 17 August 2020 (UTC)
Removal and arguments sound reasonable to me. —Scs (talk) 00:22, 18 August 2020 (UTC)
Remove, Twitter is not a reputable source. Happy to add it again when it is confirmed by a reputable source. --Hannes Röst (talk) 01:10, 18 August 2020 (UTC)
  • There is no requirement to link an online version of a reference, see Help:Sources. If you think it's needed, you could add the Reuter's report.
Wikidata isn't meant to reflect English Wikipedia's editorial choices. References are added and then ranked. Wikidata is also interested in including claims that have been shown as false, incorrect or outdated.
I don't think we want to be associated with enwiki's current controversy of information being scrubbed from the article.
BTW, I updated the section header to "Kamala Harris (Q10853588)'s middle name" as apparently only the middle name included in the certificate is being discussed. --- Jura 01:27, 18 August 2020 (UTC)
The user deleting this claim has previously attempted to delete a statement about Kamala Harris' candidacy for President of the United States from Wikidata [23]. --- Jura 02:12, 18 August 2020 (UTC)
Of course offline sources can and are being used, such as books. But in those cases, they citation represents an assurance that the person relying on the citation has seen the book, and that I could find it at a library. Google Books is also rather good for checking a specific reference on a given page.
I note Jura still doesn't want to tell us where he got that information...
As to 2020 United States presidential election (Q22923830), it gets close to bad faith not to mention the reason I gave you back then. As outlined at Talk:Q22923830, Kamala Harris (and dozens others) were candidates for the nomination for president, not candidates for president. There will not be a single ballot where you can vote for Senator Harris, or Marianne Williamson, or Julian Castro for President. Listing only candidates that win the nomination they seek, and that appear on the ballot in at least one state, is(2016) also(2012) in(2008) line(2004) with(2000) the(1996) practice(1992) on this issue going back to 1932(1932) (where I got bored and stopped checking). It's listing 45 people that never were candidates in 2020 United States presidential election (Q22923830) that is the outlier.
It's laughable to suggest that I am motivated by some animus against Senator Harris, or otherwise not interested in the quality of the data we publish on her, when just today I added citations to about 30 statements, including specific quotes, authors, etc. Frankly, it's embarrassing that an item of such importance was littered with imported from Wikimedia project (P143)Turkish Wikipedia (Q58255) or no references at all. I don't know why people consider it more urgent to add a 4-months relationship she had 25 years ago, or to fight for including a middle name she, at best, had for only the first three months of her life, than to add a single reference. --Matthias Winkelmann (talk) 02:53, 18 August 2020 (UTC)
  • Birth certificates are generally not found in libraries and the included record number should allow to locate it at the appropriate place (what the fact checker in the discussion Matthias Winkelmann mentioned at enwiki did). I think we should stop these attempts of deletion of referenced info about Kamala Harris at Wikidata. --- Jura 03:07, 18 August 2020 (UTC)
The policy names two independent reasons in that sentence. Privacy isn't the most salient issue here, but the first half of the sentence is an entirely different reason. Which is: getting things about living people wrong has the potential to be more harmful than errors made on items describing items that aren't self-aware.--Matthias Winkelmann (talk) 16:39, 18 August 2020 (UTC)
@Matthias Winkelmann: So beyond International Fact-Checking Network (Q51698517) what do you expect? And what harm is there with time and place of birth, middle name(s) sourced from the birth certificate? It's not acceptable to suppress information mererly because it's not sourced from the person's official biography (as most references you added). --- Jura 17:00, 18 August 2020 (UTC)
I think this can be resolved with the publication of this article in a reputable source The Mercury News (Q575741) which for me meets the criterion of "veracity we have a high confidence". It seems the certificate is authentic. However the question still remains how to best model the fact that her birth certificate was amended 2 weeks after birth to add the correct middle name. I would be fine with Juras approach discussed above with "reason for depreciation". --Hannes Röst (talk) 03:35, 19 August 2020 (UTC)
  • The countless comments somehow obscure that the main discussion about the certificate isn't around its authenticity, but about the interpretation of some its content (not included at Wikidata AFAIK). Birth certificates can include errors (e.g. this for Ronald Reagan has one that seems fairly obvious, even if theoretically it could be correct) and may not be easy to understand, but that just affects what rank to use.
    I'm somewhat concerned about attempts around here to suppress referenced information and substitute it with large chunks of what appears to be the official (auto)biography. The deletor even referenced that they did delete despite the verification of what is said to be an affiliate of International Fact-Checking Network (Q51698517). He was found to attempt to alter incorrectly a person name in another case [24] and I haven't really seen any reference for their claim that the amendment is considered a name change.
    As for the format of the reference, I made a proposal at Wikidata:Property_proposal/record_number. --- Jura 04:41, 19 August 2020 (UTC)
He was found to attempt to alter incorrectly a person name in another case [25]
Yeah, my bad. "Matthias" is a common first name, "Wulf" is a common last name, and neither is commonly used as the other. Being somewhat pre-disposed to notice the "Matthias" (see signature), I erroneously thought the name had been reversed in some list. It would be helpful if you occasionally referenced sources in your edits, and I would be grateful if you toned done accusations of bad faith: I wasn't "found to attempt to alter". I actually did alter it, although I believe "to change" would be the more common, less ominous-sounding verb.
As to the effects of an amendment of a birth certificate: assuming you find a reputable source for the existence/accuracy of the photo, an amendment could have three different meanings:
  • Your suggestion, of (just) deprecation: I am not sure what this way of modelling the data is supposed to mean. Just reading it, I would not be able to answer the question "is this her middle name?" It could be interpreted as being her middle name, but one she does not want to regularly use. It could also be interpreted as coming from a source of lower accuracy (not confidence) than others, in the way it is sometimes used for rounded values when more specific ones exist. Or it could be interpreted as being true in the past, but no longer, in the way we commonly rank values in time series, such as population or GDP. Part of this confusion comes with the representation, but part of it seems to simply be a lack of our understanding of what the actual truth to be represented is.
  • An amendment is commonly understood to change a legal text. I believe we are fairly confident that in the time after such an amendment, her name would no longer be the one previously included in the certificate, in the same way that alcohol seized to be illegal with the passage of the 19th (or whatever) amendment to the US Constitution.
  • But the consequences of such an amendment here could go further: it could have an effect akin to the better-known annulment of a certificate of marriage, i. e. changing the (legal) facts retroactively. This would be sensible practice if, for example, it was a clerical error that led to an initial issuance of an erroneous certificate. Analogous to the example of marriage, where divorce is a more common alternative, name changes usually do not involve the alteration of previous acts, but the creation of new, superseding acts, such as a court order (or, incidentally, marriage). Thus, it was a choice to use an amendment to the original certificate, intended to communicate "this should have always been...". As a consequence, her name never was what was printed on the original certificate.
I believe the last case to be the most convincing. And while I am principally open to include the birth certificate as soon as you find some reputable journalist who actually trekked to the courthouse, I'm not sure how to model it. The second option could be communicated with an end date in addition to deprecation, but that has the unfortunate effect of only being a clear way to communicate a fact that's probably not true. The IMHO true facts, the "typo option" above, do not have an actual end date, and would be indistinguishable from the entirely different first case.
The way out of this quandary is to recognise that a clerical error that was corrected within three months, 60 years ago, just does not warrant inclusion in the data. And as a way of compromise, as stated above, I'm open to using the birth certificate as an additional reference for DOB or parents or place of birth, provided a mainstream source can be found. That should make Jura1 happy, as he cares so much about references, evidenced by my inability of finding a single edit in a quick sampling among the 13 million he has made bothering with including a reference. --Matthias Winkelmann (talk) 06:35, 19 August 2020 (UTC)
  • Maybe you could suggest a change to Help:Sources if you think it should be limited to publications in libraries, online articles by "reputable journalists" (not fact checkers) and official (auto)biographies. --- Jura 06:50, 19 August 2020 (UTC)
For privacy sensitive statements for living people the burden is per policy with the person making a claim. If people disagree about whether there's high confidence that a particular document is authentic, it seems to me the role of the person making the claim to argue for it's authenticity. ChristianKl ❪✉❫ 19:23, 23 August 2020 (UTC)
    • @ChristianKl: Can you confirm which elements about a US VP/Presidential candidate you consider privacy sensitive? middle name? place of birth? time of birth?
      I noticed that we somehow lack the optimal way to include the info, accordingly, I made a proposal at Wikidata:Property_proposal/record_number. --- Jura 07:58, 28 August 2020 (UTC)
      • When it comes to a US VP/Presidential candidate from one perspective you can say that they are subject to having more information about them disclosed. On the other hand the importance to not publish wrong information is maybe even more important. I don't think either "middle name? place of birth? time of birth" is in every case privacy sensitive. ChristianKl ❪✉❫ 11:12, 28 August 2020 (UTC)

Description in dagbanli language

On Yumiko Ashikawa (Q4023235) was added a description in dagbanli language, but I am not sure for the meaning since is a unknown language to me. It is sure that it is write “Japanese singer”, or similar? --151.49.93.113 12:39, 27 August 2020 (UTC)

Why not just ask @Masssly: himself? Mahir256 (talk) 22:52, 27 August 2020 (UTC)
Hey 151.49.93.113, the description I added in Dagbanli is similar to the English phrase "female singer or vocalist". —M@sssly✉ 09:24, 28 August 2020 (UTC)

Maltreatment of a girl

Good morning 112 , there is a girl that her madam used to maltreat please she needs your help. And her name is Chizube Ihemedu Tessy.She is Fifteen years old. Even though you can't help ,call the police . Because the lady just beat her and split her ear. – The preceding unsigned comment was added by 105.112.105.71 (talk • contribs) at 09:19, 28 August 2020‎ (UTC).

I'm sorry but we can't help you. If you are a ten year old, you should report the matter to an adult or call the police. Giving out your phone number on the internet is a very bad idea and I have removed it. From Hill To Shore (talk) 10:05, 28 August 2020 (UTC)
Pretty sure the point of posting this was to have one of us calling the local poæice on her behalf. --Trade (talk) 13:13, 28 August 2020 (UTC)
I have reported this thread to Special:EmailUser/Emergency per en:Wikipedia:Responding_to_threats_of_harm. Bovlb (talk) 16:39, 28 August 2020 (UTC)

blocked on test instance

Dear Wikidata,

when try to make some edits on the test instance I always get the message that I do not have bot rights and cannot edit. A friend tried with the same command and the same json file - and it worked. Am I blocked? Who can unblock me?

This is the beginning of the error message: 

{ assertbotfailed: assertbotfailed: You do not have the "bot" right, so the action could not be completed.
   at requestError (/usr/local/lib/node_modules/wikibase-cli/node_modules/wikibase-edit/lib/request/insistent_req.js:72:15)
   at parseBody (/usr/local/lib/node_modules/wikibase-cli/node_modules/wikibase-edit/lib/request/insistent_req.js:65:33)
   at process._tickCallback (internal/process/next_tick.js:68:7)
  url: https://test.wikidata.org/w/api.php?action=wbeditentity&format=json&bot=true

..

--Eva (talk) 15:24, 28 August 2020 (ECT)


--solved it myself: wb config bot false

D --Eva (talk) 15:29, 28 August 2020 (ECT)

Bulk Upload to Wikidata

Hi all!

I'm building a new semantic mediawiki installation for a research lab I'm involved with, and I'm curious how I would go about programmatically and automatically pushing updates from our rdf store into Wikidata for sharing information. This will primarily be bibliographic information about papers our lab has published, with keywords and links to the published work. Is there a way to do this?

Thanks, Andrew  – The preceding unsigned comment was added by AndrewEells (talk • contribs) at 15:34, August 28, 2020‎ (UTC).

  • @AndrewEells: Wikidata and semantic mediawiki are quite distinct pieces of software and I'm not aware of any existing software to import from one to the other, though it's possible somebody's working on it. I'd suggest the best approach would be to export the data you want into a collection of CSV files if possible, and then run them through OpenRefine or one of the alternative tools available. You could also apply for a bot account here and import more directly through the API. Either way you should discuss it with the Wikidata community first to see whether the model you are using and the data itself is suitable for import here. ArthurPSmith (talk) 17:20, 28 August 2020 (UTC)
Hi Andrew! There is, obviously, an API capable of doing such things. A more convenient method for medium size and/or only semi-automated updates is Quickstatements, which allows to add/change data using a format that is so close to CSV, the remaining differences are just intended to make you pay attention. The help on QS also describes how to call it using HTTP request parameters, which is convenient to transition to an entirely automated process. I can also recommend OpenRefine, as mentioned by Arthur. It's a GUI tool and requires a bit more human involvement, which might not be the worst thing, at least in the beginning.
So, I believe there's a natural procession here, where you start by editing single items by hand to learn a bit about how the information is structured. Then, switch to OpenRefine and do a few dozen items at a time. If that grows tiring and/or is repetitive enough to allow nearly full automization, get you software to generate QuickStatement-compatible data, which you first run by hand, with the option of omitting that step later on. Use the API directly if you get into the tens of thousands of edits per month. --Matthias Winkelmann (talk) 17:33, 28 August 2020 (UTC)

Over 93,000 articles missing publication info

There are currently over 93,000 open access journal article items with a PMCID (P932) that lack crucial biographical values for published in (P1433) (i.e. journal name). In many cases (if not most or all), items for the journal already exist. Similarly, there are over 470,000 items with PubMed ID (P698) missing P1433, but many of these are the same as P932 violations, and others are e-books, book chapters, conference proceedings or other reports for which P1433 may not be appropriate. This seems like a problem perfectly suited for bots and bot handlers to solve. As a mere layperson ignorant in computer programming, are there any tweaks or additions I can make to journal items that can facilitate current and future bot additions? e.g. does an external identifier like ISSN (P236) or NLM Unique ID (P1055) need to be in place before a script can assign an article to a publication? And if so, which ones? Thanks. -Animalparty (talk) 18:00, 28 August 2020 (UTC)

Fix typo request

How to change “dagbanli” to “Dagbanli” on Language column on Dagbani (Q32238)? --151.49.93.113 19:09, 28 August 2020 (UTC)

Merging sparse items created from duplicated external identifier by setting to deprecated rank

@Epìdosis:, @EncycloPetey:,

Hi all, I am working to clean up a large batch of items that were created from Mix 'n' Match in 2018 with a National Library of Wales Authority ID (P2966) claim and no other statements. These items remain sparse two years later.

The problem is a result of the National Library of Wales authority records having, for example, a separate URL for a person, e.g. Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616 and subject facets of that person, such as Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616 -- Humor. In the source data, it is clear from the identity area that for both examples the type of entity is person. I have attempted to deal with the sparse items accordingly.

My response has been to set the identifiers that link to a facet to deprecated rank and add a reason for deprecated rank (P2241) - does not exactly match (Q42415624) qualifier before merging items with identifiers about the same entity. If we do not have an existing item, I am adding instance of (P31) and other claims to make these items useful. Where an item does exist, I am blanking the labels and merging into the existing item. This approach has reduced the number of sparse items and limited the number of deletion requests required.

However, my edits to merge English translations of the works of Euripides (Q56176803) and Sophocles (Q56184223) were reverted by EncycloPetey, who is treating the sparse items as a type (Q21146257). For me, if there is a problem, a better solution would be to simply remove the NLW Archives and Manuscripts ID and not unmerge to create what is probably a useless item.

The intention behind my editing was to deal with a problem without adding to the deletion request backlog. There are approximately 4,000 items that I still need to edit but I am not expecting to merge many of these. I am keen to avoid any conflict with other editors, not least because it becomes increasingly difficult to deal with items satisfactorily after edits are reverted.

It would be interesting to discuss whether deprecating and merging is appropriate in this situation. Are there other options? Simon Cobb (User:Sic19 ; talk page) 17:58, 28 August 2020 (UTC)

I am not treating all the sparse items the same way. It really depends on what the item is for.
With the aforementioned Euripides item, the "sparse data item" is a library subject heading for English translations of the works of Euripides. Such headings, when they exist in any database, are for a category of works, which would not be suitable to merge with a data item for a person. It is quite possible that Commons could have a category for such a collection of items, and there are listings in other library catalogs structured the same way: It is a standard format library category.
It is also not necessary to merge items just because they are sparse. If all sparse items are merged into larger items, that prevents them from being found at a later date for merge with a corresponding data item from another database. It is perfectly acceptable to retain sparse data items. And in this specific instance, a merge would be incorrect because it would merge two fundamentally different types of data items: a personal record and a category of works. --EncycloPetey (talk) 18:43, 28 August 2020 (UTC)
Thanks for your reply. I understand your point but if you look at the data provided by the identifier it is an authority record for a person. The available entity types for these authority records are person, corporate body or family. The National Library of Wales Archives and Manuscripts ID property is not for subject headings.
In my opinion, keeping items without at very least a instance of (P31) or subclass of (P279) claim is not good practice. Simon Cobb (User:Sic19 ; talk page) 19:35, 28 August 2020 (UTC)
If you follow the links to the only result in their database, they make a distinction. They distinguish between Creator and Content. This is a content subject heading, not a creator heading. It is applied to a letter that quotes a small portion of Euripides in the letter. --EncycloPetey (talk) 23:23, 28 August 2020 (UTC)

Rollback marked as minor

Why are rollbacks automatically marked as minor? Most of the time, they are not minor. --Prahlad (tell me all about it / private venue) (Please {{ping}} me) 02:35, 29 August 2020 (UTC)

The rationale is at en:Help:Minor_edit#Exceptions: "The intended use of the rollback feature is for cases of vandalism, where the act of reverting any vandalism should be considered minor (and can be ignored in the recent changes list)." Ghouston (talk) 02:59, 29 August 2020 (UTC)
@ghouston: mm-kay, thanks. --Prahlad (tell me all about it / private venue) (Please {{ping}} me) 03:47, 29 August 2020 (UTC)

Scope of "soldier"

Department of hair-splittery: is there a term for something halfway between soldier (Q4991371) and vigilante (Q4621445)? The biographical page of Jonathan Hamilton Baker (Q98694530) of Texas describes his activities thus: "In 1859 Baker was chosen to lead a company of local men organized to defend the area against Indian attacks. He first served under Captain J. R. Baylor and later participated with Captain Lawrence Sullivan Ross in the recovery of Cynthia Ann Parker, a settler seized by a group of Comanche in 1836. During the Civil War he served as leader of the home guard." In other words, it sounds as if his fighting activities were more or less organized but not part of an army -- at the time when Baker served with Captain Baylor, Baylor's troops were described as an "independent unit of Texas cavalry," I think (I am no historical expert). So does the term "soldier" apply? — Levana Taylor (talk) 04:26, 28 August 2020 (UTC)

Merge request

For some reason I cannot get merging to work. Could somebody merge Tulipa fosteriana (Q9362633) and Category:Tulipa fosteriana (Q6402988)? Thanks, Abductive (talk) 20:40, 30 August 2020 (UTC)

They can't be merged because they have both a link to Commons. I moved the Wikipedia sitelinks all to the same item. I am unsure what should happen to the category item. Pyfisch (talk) 21:11, 30 August 2020 (UTC)
As one Commons link is to a gallery and the other to a category, I have converted the emptied item into instance of (P31) Wikimedia category (Q4167836). They can both remain separate. From Hill To Shore (talk) 21:50, 30 August 2020 (UTC)

Article by Lydia in The Signpost (en-wiki)

"Wikipedia's not so little sister is finding its own way" -- Jheald (talk) 18:40, 30 August 2020 (UTC)

Great and insightful article.--Ymblanter (talk) 20:54, 30 August 2020 (UTC)
Interesting & nicely written. Q98791692 --- Jura 06:38, 31 August 2020 (UTC)

Complex references

So I'm working on improving our coverage of goodreads identifiers for works/authors. I want to write a script that infers a Goodreads author ID (P2963) using a known Goodreads version/edition ID (P2969)/Goodreads work ID (P8383) for a work and its author (P50) (goodreads's API will tell me the ID of a work's author). Should be fairly reliable but how do I encode this into the reference? It relies on both a statement in wikidata and information in goodreads. Should I give up and just say I use some form of based on heuristic (P887)? I almost wish I could write a comment explaining what I did somewhere. BrokenSegue (talk) 03:05, 31 August 2020 (UTC)

Perhaps inferred from (P3452) = The Count of Monte Cristo (Q191838) ?
You may need to sanity check the names being assigned, to make sure that neither side has any additional or alternate authors listed that could confuse the assignments.
A subject named as (P1810) qualifier on the ID statement is also a good thing. Jheald (talk) 07:52, 31 August 2020 (UTC)
Ah, thanks. All good ideas. And yeah I was planning on sanity checking the results as you suggested. BrokenSegue (talk) 13:58, 31 August 2020 (UTC)

How do I specify a period of years?

In SNCV/NMVB SO type tram (Q98792966) I used decades, but it can be more specific: Build from 1953 to 1959. Out of service: from 1980 to 1982. How can I specify this?

This type of tram is a rebuild of an older type of tram: 'standaard' (see nl:Nationale Maatschappij van Buurtspoorwegen#1921–1947). reconstruction (Q2478058) is specific for buildings, is there anything for vehicles?

Is there a property for undirectional trams? There is only one steering post. The other side has a door for acces to trailers.Smiley.toerist (talk) 11:00, 31 August 2020 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #431

 
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Tool of the week
    • Wikidata for Firefox is a browser extension that displays Wikidata items while browsing the web, adds missing IDs and extracts information from websites to Wikidata.
  • Development
    • Working on Automated Configuration Discovery to make it easier for tool builders to make their tools work for other Wikibase instances as well
    • Polishing remaining pieces of the first version of Federated Properties to make it possible to use Wikidata's Properties in other Wikibase instances
    • Continuing to work on improving the way ORES automatically scores the quality of an Item to make it more accurate

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here. If you want to help, you can also have a look at the tasks needing a volunteer.

file extension missing -error in Wikibase-CLI

I try to edit an item Q212733 in the test instance using the file Q212733.json containing: {"id": "Q212733", "claims": {"P50": {"value": "Q212734", "qualifier": [{"P1932": "('first name', 'last name')"}]}}}

When I try to push it (wb edit-entity ./Q212733.json) I get an error message informing me, the file would miss the file extension.

"{ modification-failed: modification-failed: File extension is missing. at requestError (/usr/local/lib/node_modules/wikibase-cli/node_modules/wikibase-edit/lib/request/insistent_req.js:72:15) at parseBody (/usr/local/lib/node_modules/wikibase-cli/node_modules/wikibase-edit/lib/request/insistent_req.js:65:33) at process._tickCallback (internal/process/next_tick.js:68:7) url: https://test.wikidata.org/w/api.php?action=wbeditentity&format=json"

When I try to perform the command for the default Wikidata instance it apparently works (I did not execute to make no confusion). The error could be related to the Q212734 item that I try to register for the Q212733 as part of the error message is: "{ error: { code: 'modification-failed', info: 'File extension is missing.', messages: [ { name: 'wikibase-validator-check-file-type', parameters: [ 'Q212734' ], html: { '*': 'File extension is missing.' } } ],"


I don't get what is wrong. Thank you for a hint! --Eva (talk) 16:05, 31 August 2020 (CET)

Test Wikidata and regular Wikidata have different properties. Here P50 is author (P50), while on test it is Depiction and expects a commons media file. In your edit you attempt to link an item which fails because a filename was expected. To test your edit on Test Wikidata find a Property of the same type as P50 here. Pyfisch (talk) 14:45, 31 August 2020 (UTC)
Ha, now it works! I could have thought of that myself! Thanks a lot @Pyfisch:! --Eva (talk) 12:30, 1 Septembert 2020 (CET)

Label and "part #3 of cultural heritage D-1-62-000-3976 in Bavaria, Germany"

What do people think of the labels created by User:Derzno, e.g. "part #3 of cultural heritage D-1-62-000-3976 in Bavaria, Germany" for Q98739961?

It seems to be me that this is more suitable for descriptions if any. Despite being asked to stop using that, we keep getting more of them, potentially 100,000. --- Jura 07:22, 30 August 2020 (UTC)

I'd said this now many times! We can change the labels to whatever we want. Before we have to have a clear naming scheme for and I'll need to finish my other more important cleanup work first before. I'll take care of this "nice to have" request and for me it's a name not more not less. It is on my todo list with a less priority and you don't explain till now why this should fixed urgently. Please stop to open this discussion again and again with blaming myself on new, other websites, ok? --Derzno (talk) 07:34, 30 August 2020 (UTC)
I wonder why the Bavarian monument authority ID (P4244) was missing (added it now). If it's a complex, you should have one item for the complex and an item for each part all linked together. See Elswout sluice (Q17186990) for an example. Multichill (talk) 15:22, 30 August 2020 (UTC)
I think the monument id property is wrong on this item as it is only a part. Agathoclea (talk) 06:45, 31 August 2020 (UTC)
Please discuss this issue here. This is the place where Jura has started first. --Derzno (talk) 06:49, 31 August 2020 (UTC)
I left the message there to ask people to help you fix the German labels, given that there may be some language barrier. German (or Spanish, etc) project chat isn't a suitable place to discuss the English language label dammage. --- Jura 07:20, 31 August 2020 (UTC)

Proposal

Folks, the discussion still ongoing but I’ll guess it’ll be likely with same label naming in German and English (not translated), without any numbers and a description in German with more details in German only. Description English only a generic text with the official ID. Reason, the database doesn’t accept the same combination of label/description more than ones and in many cases this will fail without. So a clear “difference” is required. Example, see Friedhofskapelle in Königsdorf (Q98742346) --Derzno (talk) 08:24, 31 August 2020 (UTC)

  • In Wikidata, guidelines for labels and description vary for each language. As this is the project chat in English, it's better not to ask for feedback about German descriptions here (e.g. is it acceptable that I add 3 synonyms in the German description?).
As for the English label of Q98742346 I think it should either be "Friedhofskapelle Königsdorf" or "Friedhofskapelle", but not "Friedhofskapelle in Königsdorf" as the seems like it includes part of the description. If there is an English name for this, please use it. You could also leave it empty. It's clear that changes like https://www.wikidata.org/w/index.php?title=Q41403711&diff=1263980467&oldid=1263927735 or https://www.wikidata.org/w/index.php?title=Q41294974&diff=1264181591&oldid=1264060898 should be undone.
Maybe it would be clearer if you listed guidelines or sample items you are using for inspiration. --- Jura 09:03, 1 September 2020 (UTC)
Folks, I have started now for a limited area to change the English labels and related description. Good thing, the batch runs so far no more without any significant problems. Before I’ll roll out for the rest of Bavarian objects, please have a look if this is now in compliance with the rules. The changes were made with batch1 for top level items and batch2 for sub-Ids. Please keep in mind, the input data is as it is. They are very limited and can be used only as they are. I don’t translate anything. Only some combination of available data is possible to avoid bouncing with violate same label and description if used more than ones. If this proposal will be pushed back again I’m getting to start to remove all English labels and description and keep it empty. I have not the time to do a lot of work, wait hours for quickstatements tool with well known issues and getting back later on “this is not compliant” answer. Concerning the quality of the most former and not from myself added datasets, it’s better that I didn’t comment. Strange on me that nobody noticed this. --Derzno (talk) 07:09, 2 September 2020 (UTC)

I didn’t saw any objections to my proposal and assume that the English labels/description fulfill the estimated requirements. The rest of Bavarian object changes batches will starts now. --Derzno (talk) 05:23, 3 September 2020 (UTC)

@Derzno: Why did you leave the awkward ID of a specific database in the English description? (Example) --Emu (talk) 15:24, 3 September 2020 (UTC)
@Emu:, We have approximately 160k of Bavarian objects. I’m using only available raw-data without any manipulation. The likelihood is very high, that a combination of the same label and the same description is very high. It ‘s only possible to have ones the same combination. If you try to add twice same combination the tool will block you. No idea why implemented that constrain but it is as it is. So you have to have a certain kind of clear difference between all used data. Best case in my opinion is the ID. All other like location, address and other will fail and a German description text doesn’t help non natives. The only other unique choice would be to use coordinates or a free numbering but think that’s no option. By the way this fact was the reason why I’d started to “expand the labels” and got this nice discussion on top of my huge work to clean up. You see all theory works possible with a small quantity of data but comes in trouble with big numbers. Not new, isn’t it? To be honest, I’m quite happy that I didn’t have to maintain my component-part-lists of electronically equipment from industrial products with this database. Such constrains with strange workarounds never been accepted in a business world. Anyhow I'll guess the fixing batches will completed this night and we can close finally this item. --Derzno (talk) 17:01, 3 September 2020 (UTC)
Have a look in my history, the batches still running. --Derzno (talk) 17:31, 3 September 2020 (UTC)
Can you stop them? Please link a few sample items so we will later know what we discussed. BTW "München" is Munich in English, see Q1726. Why did you drop "Germany" from the description? What happens for https://www.wikidata.org/w/index.php?title=Q41403711&diff=1263980467&oldid=1263927735 or https://www.wikidata.org/w/index.php?title=Q41294974&diff=1264181591&oldid=1264060898 --- Jura 05:25, 4 September 2020 (UTC)
@Jura1:, I’d noticed this afternoon your new request. Please give me in such cases a ping, I’m not checking all the time the forum. I’m very disappointed that you ask for changes and reviewing so late. There was enough time and I’d explained above what and why I did it. The request to change labels/description is already processed. As requested here some typical implemented examples. Bauernhaus (Q98643509) Stadtmauer (Q98650574) on top level and Wohnhaus Liebigstraße 5; Liebigstraße 7 in Burghausen (Q98741352) Friedhofsmauer Josef-Kurz-Straße 1 in Deining (Q98677521) on sub level. Concerning “München” I’d wrote many times that I don’t translate anything and using raw data only. By the way Nürnberg is “Nuremberg” and I’ll guess a couple more can be found. To Germany move out, somebody removed it manually and left a DIS on an object DIS that this is obsolete with using country (P17). Indeed that’s true and I’d removed it. Back on your first new ones, what is better to use an address as a label which nobody knows what it is or telling it’s a heritage? The second one you’re right, That’s definitely my fault and it was overseen in my former workflow to check first if useful naming has already been given as label before overwriting. I’ll assume this will hit less as 100 data-sets with articles or commons only. I’ll check it later on. To make it short, for me your initial request to get rid of number salad is fully completed. The labels provided now by myself are possobly not perfect but not wrong. And after this vandalism escalation you can be sure that I don’t touch the English labels anymore. The rest of the x0.000 missing labels/description I’ll keep open and don’t care any more if people getting Q… instead of something behind. If you'll find something new with the examples above as mismatch or new whish like that “ü, ö, Ä ß” have to be replaced, you have to look for somebody else. I’m out in the label game and thanks for your headsup. --Derzno (talk) 16:36, 4 September 2020 (UTC)

What categories contain

In the items for categories, you can indicate what a category contains. When this is done judicially, it is possible to query the result and get what should be / could be in a category as a result. A good example can be found in this one. The problem is that many categories are associated with qualifiers that are too broad eg "civil servant" on a category for Senegalese national ministers. It could make a Donald Trump a Senegalese minister of education...

When the content of categories are adequately defined, they can be used for processes that update Wikipedias and Wikidata. Afterall it is how content is imported into Wikidata from Wikipedias using Petscan. What I am looking for is to define what categories we can automate imports. Is this best done through an additional qualifier or property? Thanks, GerardM (talk) 07:48, 29 August 2020 (UTC)

That is another way to say the same thing. Are there tools that make use of this? Thanks, GerardM (talk) 18:29, 29 August 2020 (UTC)
This is one example I did. It has one important draw back. When items get merged what happens with the results? Thanks, GerardM (talk) 19:14, 29 August 2020 (UTC)
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