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Come find out what "Talk Page Theatre" is all about! The last Wednesday evening of every other month, wiki enthusiasts gather at Bay Area WikiSalon to collaborate, mingle, and learn about new projects and ideas.
We allow time for informal conversation and working on articles. Newcomers and experienced wiki users are encouraged to attend. Free Wi-Fi is available so bring your editing devices. We will have beverages (including beer and wine) plus light snacks. We will be at the NEW Wikimedia Foundation offices! w00t!!!
Please note: You shouldRSVP here,and bring a photo ID that matches your registration name. This also helps us figure out how much food and drink to bring in.
Under the heading rerum causas cognescere, the first ever Wikidata conference got under way in the Tagesspiegel building with two keynotes, One was on YAGO, about how a knowledge base conceived ten years ago if you assume automatic compilation from Wikipedia. The other was from manager Lydia Pintscher, on the "state of the data". Interesting rumours flourished: the mix'n'match tool and its 600+ datasets, mostly in digital humanities, to be taken off the hands of its author Magnus Manske by the WMF; a Wikibase incubator site is on its way. Announcements came in talks: structured data on Wikimedia Commons is scheduled to make substantive progress by 2019. The lexeme development on Wikidata is now not expected to make the Wiktionary sites redundant, but may facilitate automated compilation of dictionaries.
And so it went, with five strands of talks and workshops, through to 11 pm on Saturday. Wikidata applies to GLAM work via metadata. It may be used in education, raises issues such as author disambiguation, and lends itself to different types of graphical display and reuse. Many millions of SPARQL queries are run on the site every day. Over the summer a large open science bibliography has come into existence there.
Hello, Jdforrester. Voting in the 2017 Arbitration Committee elections is now open until 23.59 on Sunday, 10 December. All users who registered an account before Saturday, 28 October 2017, made at least 150 mainspace edits before Wednesday, 1 November 2017 and are not currently blocked are eligible to vote. Users with alternate accounts may only vote once.
The Arbitration Committee is the panel of editors responsible for conducting the Wikipedia arbitration process. It has the authority to impose binding solutions to disputes between editors, primarily for serious conduct disputes the community has been unable to resolve. This includes the authority to impose site bans, topic bans, editing restrictions, and other measures needed to maintain our editing environment. The arbitration policy describes the Committee's roles and responsibilities in greater detail.
You are invited to join the Wikimedia NYC community for our monthly "WikiWednesday" evening salon (7-9pm) and knowledge-sharing workshop at Babycastles gallery by 14th Street / Union Square in Manhattan.
We will include a look at the organization and planning for our chapter, and expanding volunteer roles for both regular Wikipedia editors and new participants.
We will also follow up on plans for recent and upcoming edit-a-thons, museum and library projects, education initiatives, and other outreach activities.
We welcome the participation of our friends from the Free Culture movement and from all educational and cultural institutions interested in developing free knowledge projects.
After the main meeting, pizza/chicken/vegetables and refreshments and video games in the gallery!
(You can subscribe/unsubscribe from future notifications for NYC-area events by adding or removing your name from this list.)
Facto Post – Issue 7 – 15 December 2017
Facto Post – Issue 7 – 15 December 2017
A new bibliographical landscape
At the beginning of December, Wikidata items on individual scientific articles passed the 10 million mark. This figure contrasts with the state of play in early summer, when there were around half a million. In the big picture, Wikidata is now documenting the scientific literature at a rate that is about eight times as fast as papers are published. As 2017 ends, progress is quite evident.
Behind this achievement are a technical advance (fatameh), and bots that do the lifting. Much more than dry migration of metadata is potentially involved, however. If paper A cites paper B, both papers having an item, a link can be created on Wikidata, and the information presented to both human readers, and machines. This cross-linking is one of the most significant aspects of the scientific literature, and now a long-sought open version is rapidly being built up.
The effort for the lifting of copyright restrictions on citation data of this kind has had real momentum behind it during 2017. WikiCite and the I4OC have been pushing hard, with the result that on CrossRef over 50% of the citation data is open. Now the holdout publishers are being lobbied to release rights on citations.
But all that is just the beginning. Topics of papers are identified, authors disambiguated, with significant progress on the use of the four million ORCID IDs for researchers, and proposals formulated to identify methodology in a machine-readable way. P4510 on Wikidata has been introduced so that methodology can sit comfortably on items about papers.
You are invited to join us at Ace Hotel for Wikipedia Day NYC 2018, a Wikipedia celebration and mini-conference as part of the project's global 16th birthday festivities. In addition to the party, the event will be a participatory unconference, with keynotes, plenary panels, lightning talks, and of course open space sessions.
And there will be cake.
We also hope for the participation of our friends from the Free Culture movement and from educational and cultural institutions interested in developing free knowledge projects.
Part of Wikipedia's global 17th birthday celebration, Wikipedia Day NYC 2018 at Ace Hotel will include a mini-conference of scheduled panels as well as unconference style talks and discussions proposed by attendees on the day of the event. We are very excited to announce speakers such as Jason Scott (Internet Archive), Jackie Koerner (Visiting Scholar, Wiki Ed), and Andrew Lih (Wikimedia DC), as well as a fantastic line-up of panels that highlight projects and issues of relevance to the Wikimedia NYC community.
We also hope for the participation of our friends from the Free Culture movement and from educational and cultural institutions interested in developing free knowledge projects.
From the days of hard-copy liner notes on music albums, metadata have stood outside a piece or file, while adding to understanding of where it comes from, and some of what needs to be appreciated about its content. In the GLAM sector, the accumulation of accurate metadata for objects is key to the mission of an institution, and its presentation in cataloguing.
Today Wikipedia turns 17, with worlds still to conquer. Zooming out from the individual GLAM object to the ontology in which it is set, one such world becomes apparent: GLAMs use custom ontologies, and those introduce massive incompatibilities. From a recent article by sadads, we quote the observation that "vocabularies needed for many collections, topics and intellectual spaces defy the expectations of the larger professional communities." A job for the encyclopedist, certainly. But the data-minded Wikimedian has the advantages of Wikidata, starting with its multilingual data, and facility with aliases. The controlled vocabulary — sometimes referred to as a "thesaurus" as term of art — simplifies search: if a "spade" must be called that, rather than "shovel", it is easier to find all spade references. That control comes at a cost.
Case studies in that article show what can lie ahead. The schema crosswalk, in jargon, is a potential answer to the GLAM Babel of proliferating and expanding vocabularies. Even if you have no interest in Wikidata as such, simply vocabularies V and W, if both V and W are matched to Wikidata, then a "crosswalk" arises from term v in V to w in W, whenever v and w both match to the same item d in Wikidata.
For metadata mobility, match to Wikidata. It's apparently that simple: infrastructure requirements have turned out, so far, to be challenges that can be met.
One way of looking at Wikidata relates it to the semantic web concept, around for about as long as Wikipedia, and realised in dozens of distributed Web institutions. It sees Wikidata as supplying central, encyclopedic coverage of linked structured data, and looks ahead to greater support for "federated queries" that draw together information from all parts of the emerging network of websites.
Another perspective might be likened to a photographic negative of that one: Wikidata as an already-functioning Web hub. Over half of its properties are identifiers on other websites. These are Wikidata's "external links", to use Wikipedia terminology: one type for the DOI of a publication, another for the VIAF page of an author, with thousands more such. Wikidata links out to sites that are not nominally part of the semantic web, effectively drawing them into a larger system. The crosswalk possibilities of the systematic construction of these links was covered in Issue 8.
Wikipedia:External links speaks of them as kept "minimal, meritable, and directly relevant to the article." Here Wikidata finds more of a function. On viaf.org one can type a VIAF author identifier into the search box, and find the author page. The Wikidata Resolver tool, these days including Open Street Map, Scholia etc., allows this kind of lookup. The hub tool by maxlath takes a major step further, allowing both lookup and crosswalk to be encoded in a single URL.
You are invited to join the Wikimedia NYC community for our monthly "WikiWednesday" evening salon (7-9pm) and knowledge-sharing workshop at Babycastles gallery by 14th Street / Union Square in Manhattan.
We will include a look at the organization and planning for our chapter, and expanding volunteer roles for both regular Wikipedia editors and new participants.
We will also follow up on plans for recent and upcoming edit-a-thons, museum and library projects, education initiatives, and other outreach activities.
We welcome the participation of our friends from the Free Culture movement and from all educational and cultural institutions interested in developing free knowledge projects.
After the main meeting, pizza/chicken/vegetables and refreshments and video games in the gallery!
(You can subscribe/unsubscribe from future notifications for NYC-area events by adding or removing your name from this list.)
Women's History Month 2018 at Women in Red
Welcome to Women in Red's March 2018 worldwide online editathons.
Historically, our March event has been one of the biggest offerings of the year. This year, we are collaborating with two other wiki communities. Our article campaign is the official on-line/virtual node for Art+Feminism. Our image campaign supports the Whose Knowledge? initiative.
Women's History Month 2018
Around the time in February when Wikidata clicked past item Q50000000, another milestone was reached: the mix'n'match tool uploaded its 1000th dataset. Concisely defined by its author, Magnus Manske, it works "to match entries in external catalogs to Wikidata". The total number of entries is now well into eight figures, and more are constantly being added: a couple of new catalogs each day is normal.
Since the end of 2013, mix'n'match has gradually come to play a significant part in adding statements to Wikidata. Particularly in areas with the flavour of digital humanities, but datasets can of course be about practically anything. There is a catalog on skyscrapers, and two on spiders.
These days mix'n'match can be used in numerous modes, from the relaxed gamified click through a catalog looking for matches, with prompts, to the fantastically useful and often demanding search across all catalogs. I'll type that again: you can search 1000+ datasets from the simple box at the top right. The drop-down menu top left offers "creation candidates", Magnus's personal favourite. m:Mix'n'match/Manual for more.
For the Wikidatan, a key point is that these matches, however carried out, add statements to Wikidata if, and naturally only if, there is a Wikidata property associated with the catalog. For everyone, however, the hands-on experience of deciding of what is a good match is an education, in a scholarly area, biographical catalogs being particularly fraught. Underpinning recent rapid progress is an open infrastructure for scraping and uploading.
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