This is an archive of past discussions with User:John Cummings. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page.
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.
@Ipigott:, thanks very much for this, I'll have a look at everything properly tomorrow, the rules look excellent, I think they may need to be paired with some basic mechanics of editing Wikipedia (which buttons to press to different things etc). Thanks again. John Cummings (talk) 16:35, 11 February 2018 (UTC)
Glad to see you've become a member of Women in Red, especially as you hope to bring us lots of new members. I'm sure we'll all be happy to help you develop your plans.--Ipigott (talk) 13:17, 15 February 2018 (UTC)
Thanks very much @Ipigott:, the thing I really need is help from someone who can create and edit FormWizard forms. I currently have a a button on my draft page for the event Wikipedia:WikiProject_Women_in_Red/Events/UNESCO_2018 which allows people to join WiR, however when people fill in the form it takes them to a userpage that only offers them the option of going back to the main WiR page, not the event page. I really need to find a fix... Also I'd really love to add FormWizard forms to a few other places including Wikipedia:WikiProject Women in Red/Resources#External links to make it easier for new people and passers by to add useful resources. Do you know who might be able to do this? John Cummings (talk) 19:26, 15 February 2018 (UTC)
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
Workaround for the Visual Editor in the Wikipedia name space
Hi, John! I do a lot of outreach here in Queensland and I train using the Visual Editor only (I have previously trained using the source editor and the difference is astounding, VE is much easier for people to learn and use, and some people now continue editing after the VE training sessions which was rarely happening before with the source editor). But, as you have discovered, it means that when these folks want to embark on projects, the Wikipedia name space is closed to them.
The workaround is to add {{VEFriendly}} to the start of any Wikipedia namespace page that you need VE-only people to work with. This means the page has to be started using the source editor, but after the template is added, anyone can edit it using the VE. Apart from the shiny button to click, what is happening under the hood is that it launches the URL with "&veaction=editsource" which starts the Visual Editor. See it here on Wikipedia:GLAM/State Library of Queensland and the active subpages of that page. Also see it at User Talk:Kerry Raymond. You are unlikely to get any support to add it to more widely used pages, due to the intense opposition to the Visual Editor that you may have observed. And if a page is using a lot of templates, it may be difficult in any case for the VE user to edit the templates (possible but once inside a template, you need wikicode) so common templates like multi-column are difficult for VE users). WhatamIdoing says my template doesn't work with people using wikitext instead of source editor (wikitext is the halfway house which does source editing within the toolbar and tool support of the Visual Editor). I don't use wikitext myself as I use a lot of gadgets which don't work with wikitext, so I either use VE (for most of my normal content editing) or traditional source editor for when I need to heavy-duty work with templates or use my gadgets. As I work with VE users (rather than wikitext users), this limitation is not a problem to me. Enjoy! Kerry (talk) 22:53, 21 February 2018 (UTC)
@Kerry Raymond:, thanks very much for the explanation, I've decided to move everything to Meta because its going to be in multiple languages and there may be blocks on VE in other languages I don't know about. I'm currently looking at if there is some sort of template or code that will block Visual Editor on a page, do you know if that exists? This would allow the few admin pages which use the Wikipedia: namespace to use that and allow all Wikiprojects to have VE enabled and make nice tables etc. Thanks again John Cummings (talk) 08:39, 23 February 2018 (UTC)
I don't believe that the VE is blocked anywhere, but rather the user interface doesn't have the tab to easily invoke the Visual Editor from certain namespaces. All the tab does is launch the Visual Editor just as my template does and it works everywhere I have tried the template, so I don't think there is any restriction. Certainly I would prefer it to enable all the namespaces and just a template to restrict it in the few places where it would be a problem. Kerry (talk) 08:53, 23 February 2018 (UTC)
Edit-a-thon
Hi,
I see you mentioned you might want to create several hundred accounts for an edit-a-thon. I think I am friendly with one of the bureaucrats who give the account creator rights. Do you want me teo ask them for zh.wiki? Artix Kreiger (talk) 14:34, 23 February 2018 (UTC)
Women in Red has a few admins. Do you want us to be on stand-by on March 8th for account creation? If yes, let me know what system would work best for you, e.g. maybe Slack? maybe Google Chat window? maybe Women in Red talkpage? --Rosiestep (talk) 17:10, 23 February 2018 (UTC)
I just tested out join the wiki4women course/programme. I note that the numbers signed up have increased from 11 this morning to 20 this evening. However, it wouldn't let me join. At least it appeared not to. I received the following message at this page:
500 — internal server error. :-( Something went wrong. Please contact the maintainers of this dashboard to let them know about the problem.
However, when I tried a second time I received this message: Enrollment failed. Users may not join the same course twice. I managed to find myself listed. I then tried to assign myself a brand new article on en.wiki (noting that I did change it from fr. to en.) I plan to create and work on Susan J. Patrick, but when I clicked "View full contribution history on Wikipedia", I received my very paltry contribution list for French wikipedia, not en.wiki. I think this might confuse users.
I signed up to get myself sent a certificate, and noted wierd translation on this page which somone might like to address. (My emboldening):
The #WIKI4WOMEN initiative calls everyone to take few minutes (from 30 minutes) of their time to create, enrich or translate, in as many languages as possible, Wikipedia portraits of women committed in the fields of education, science, culture, social and human sciences, or communication and information. No matter where you are in the world, all you have to do to join #WIKI4WOMEN is:
create an account on Wikipedia
start working on women portraits:
I'd also point out that the correct spellings on that page and elsewhere should be enrol; enrolling, and enrolment (one, two and one 'L's respectively).
Hi John. As far as I can see, 22 of your group registered on Women in Red today. Two of them contributed, the others just registered. I've welcomed them all and added their names to the WiR mailing list. I'll check them out over the next few days (together with those who registered earlier).--Ipigott (talk) 18:30, 8 March 2018 (UTC)
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.
Open Citations Month, with its eminently guessable hashtag, is upon us. We should be utterly grateful that in the past 12 months, so much data on which papers cite which other papers has been made open, and that Wikidata is playing its part in hosting it as "cites" statements. At the time of writing, there are 15.3M Wikidata items that can do that.
Pulling back to look at open access papers in the large, though, there is is less reason for celebration. Access in theory does not yet equate to practical access. A recent LSE IMPACT blogpost puts that issue down to "heterogeneity". A useful euphemism to save us from thinking that the whole concept doesn't fall into the realm of the oxymoron.
Some home truths: aggregation is not content management, if it falls short on reusability. The PDF file format is wedded to how humans read documents, not how machines ingest them. The salami-slicer is our friend in the current downloading of open access papers, but for a better metaphor, think about skinning an onion, laboriously, 100 times with diminishing returns. There are of the order of 100 major publisher sites hosting open access papers, and the predominant offer there is still a PDF.
Red onion cross section
From the discoverability angle, Wikidata's bibliographic resources combined with the SPARQL query are superior in principle, by far, to existing keyword searches run over papers. Open access content should be managed into consistent HTML, something that is currently strenuous. The good news, such as it is, would be that much of it is already in XML. The organisational problem of removing further skins from the onion, with sensible prioritisation, is certainly not insuperable. The CORE group (the bloggers in the LSE posting) has some answers, but actually not all that is needed for the text and data mining purposes they highlight. The long tail, or in other words the onion heart when it has become fiddly beyond patience to skin, does call for a pis aller. But the real knack is to do more between the XML and the heart.
I was reading literacy and I noticed it had an unusual "Sources" section, which seemed out of place to me. It uses Template:Free-content attribution, which references Wikipedia:Adding open license text to Wikipedia directly in articles where the template is transcluded. I posted a message on the talk page of the template, but I wanted to raise a larger discussion about this here. I thought I should ask you about it first.
I want to explicitly say that I think the work that this template and the Wikipedia: namespace page support is overall a positive thing for the encyclopedia and I don't want to discourage you or anyone/anything by discussing this. Also, I could totally be out of line here and completely missing something about this and if so I apologize in advance.
My concern is that Wikipedia:Adding open license text to Wikipedia is presented as policy and prominently linked within a number of articles directly in the text of the page. As far as I can tell, the page was created by you in 2016 with some input from others, but no widespread discussion or notification about it. What is the status of this page? Is it legit? It is also linked to from a few other Wikipedia namespace pages, including policy pages. However, WP:FREECOPYING and the where to place attribution section further down seem to be sufficient. The template seems to go against some of what is written on Wikipedia:Plagiarism. For instance, the language in the template about Wikipedia doesn't seem like it belongs on the article page directly and there is no clear link to the template and the actual text it applies to in the article.
Again, I could totally be missing something and I don't want to cause any stress. I'm just trying to understand if these pages and templates (and how they are used) need to be changed to reflect our current policies. In general, I think this is an awesome idea and I'd like to help if I can.
I would suggest the instructions on Wikipedia:Plagiarism#Where_to_place_attribution are somewhat vague and don't give people enough information to attribute text well, e.g it tells people to place appropriate attribution template and then links people to chose from over 400 templates.... My understanding is that the templates exist to understand which sources the text comes from, so if you want to use a new source you have to create a new template, which is a very high technical requirement. The system I created doesn't rely on this and text from any source or a group of sources can be used and measured (e.g pageviews). The template I used (which already existsed, I just added some sections) allows you to have metrics, which is very useful for working with partner organisations e.g here are all the Wikipedia articles that include open license text from UNESCO, you simply change the search term to find text from other sources, which is explained in Measuring Reach section of the page.
My suggestion is for me to update the instructions in Wikipedia:Plagiarism#Where_to_place_attribution with a link to the instructions I wrote, they provide clearer information, especially on which license text can be used and also provide clearer attribution for the source of the text.
That all makes sense, and again, I'm not saying you did anything wrong or improper (more explicitly, I don't think it would be appropriate for me to suggest that either). Currently, there is a link to {{free-content attribution}} in Wikipedia:Plagiarism#Where to place attribution (see additional note below), and I think adding to that section with more explicit instructions about proper attribution would be great. However, I do think the template needs to be changed to be more in line (i.e. more inconspicuous) with the other attribution templates referenced there and I think we should also encourage more explicit, inline references to accompany these edits that incorporate free content in your instructions.
For example, as currently written there is no way to know why there are three USESCO works explicitly called out (as opposed to the dozen or so others that are also referenced with what I assume would be similar licenses) at the end of literacy in a very prominent section above the rest of the references with three separate {{free-content attribution}} templates. This results in the text "To learn how to add open-license text to Wikipedia articles, please see Wikipedia:Adding open license text to Wikipedia. For information on reusing text from Wikipedia, please see the the terms of use." being repeated three times in addition to the three large and unexplained logos. I don't think that text or logos should be in the article namespace since they have nothing to do with the article or its sources. In addition, I see there are direct attributions to the three PDF sources inline like any other citation as suggested in the guideline: "a paragraph or a few sentences copied from compatibly licensed or public-domain text which is not placed within quotations, then putting an attribution template in a footnote at the end of the sentences or paragraph is sufficient." If the license information were also added to those inline references then, in theory, we could remove the multiple {{free-content attribution}}s from the article entirely.
This would require a major change to the template and/or your instructions, possibly creating a new template that could work inside <ref></ref> tags instead, maybe making some minor changes to {{CC-notice}} to include the additional information you added to {{free-content attribution}}, or even placing the template you created on the talk page of the article instead. The latter would have the benefit of not disrupting your statistics but would still require an explicit reference to the license on the article page as well.
Big difference, right? Especially when it is used multiple times in an article. The former can be used in a bulleted or numbered list without messing with the visual look, but the latter needs to be either in its own section or at the very beginning or end of one. In both cases I think the link to the instructions is not appropriate for regular Wikipedia articles. I hope this helps. - PaulT+/C16:15, 24 March 2018 (UTC)
Hi @Psantora:, thanks for your thoughtful reply, I'll try and break up my answer into the different issues you've raised:
Attribution
Yes, knowing which text comes from which source isn't possible except looking at the diffs, which is a real limitation. What I'm hoping to do with this is to build up a body of work to show the impact and then ask for the technical work to happen to be able to have some kind of bookends for the text to know which text comes from which source. I outlined it in a proposal for an additional button on the editing toolbar here Grants:IdeaLab/An open license text reuse tool for the Visual Editor toolbar which has some support. I think one option would be to write this up again for the community wishlist.
Prominence of credit
I think having a separate section for sources is needed because the text is fulfilling two pruposes:
A reference: in the instructions it tells people to include the sources as a reference as well
A source: the credit for the text reuse, this is different to it being a reference.
The prominence of the logo is different on different devices, on my work computer with a high res screen the icon is tiny, but on my laptop it is larger, on my phone the section is collapsed so I don't see it unless I click on it and then the logo is tiny. Perhaps there is a way of specifying the size as a percentage of screen width rather than number of pixels? Although I've no idea how.
Linking to the instructions
Why do you think having a link to the instructions for using the tool is inappropriate? I think it is important to keep the link between the tool and the instructions to allow anyone who want to do it to be able to do it easily. This is something Wikipedia is generally bad at and often to know how to do something requires clairvoyance or creative googling or just asking around because the resources aren't linked together.
Hi John, thanks for taking the time to write such a lengthy and comprehensive reply!
Regarding attribution, I think we are on the same page here. I'd love to read that proposal, but I don't think you wrote out the correct link. Can you double-check? It is currently a redlink.No more! Sounds interesting. I'll look into it further a little later.
Regarding prominence, I think both purposes you listed are important. I don't follow how it then requires a separate section taking up way more visual space with duplicative text and links. I think both purposes can be fulfilled by having an inline reference when appropriate and possible, but if that is not possible there is no reason the template couldn't be listed directly below any inline references within the same section (similar to Apple Inc.#Bibliography - sorry, not the greatest example, it was the first one I could find). I expanded my comment on the talk page of the template with some proposed changes to bring the template back in line with the way it used to be (and to match the other attribution templates). This also has the nice side effect of allowing this template to be used in a bulleted list and/or an inline reference without any issues. I really don't see any reason why the logo should be any more prominent than the other attribution templates with .
Regarding the link to the instructions, my understanding is Wikipedia is not an instruction manual (not even for writing an encyclopedia, unless the instructions are in the "Wikipedia" namespace). I don't recall ever seeing any links in the article namespace that point to the inner workings of Wikipedia unless there is some kind of (hopefully) temporary problem with an article such as the {{verifiability}} cleanup template at the top of an article or section. In this case, the link to instructions is intended as a permanent addition to the article. I'm all for making it easier for others to get involved with the project, but it shouldn't happen at the expense of article quality. To be clear, there can still be links to the instructions on the template documentation page and in other namespaces. Right now it also feels a little WP:SPAMmy since it is included in every transclusion of the template, which is often multiple times in a row.
I'll be the first to admit that I'm no authority when it comes to something like this and I'm happy to expand this discussion beyond just the two of us if you feel differently about anything above. I think the work that you are doing to increase and encourage high-value content in Wikipedia is a very good thing and I want to help. Thanks for reading (again)! - PaulT+/C14:21, 30 March 2018 (UTC)
@Psantora:, sorry for the late reply, I've been doing some more research on Wikipedia:What Wikipedia is not an instruction manual. The policy appears to relate to the body of the article, rather than in the other sections, as you say there are maintenance templates prominently at the top of the page which include instructions. My problem with removing the link is that it makes them less useful and usable, including for non Wikimedians who want to reuse the text. I think the most sensible thing is to ask for a clarification on the talk page of the policy. Does this sound OK? John Cummings (talk) 15:14, 9 April 2018 (UTC)
Hi there John, no worries at all. I'm happy to open this discussion up to include more people. Just point me to it. Thanks. - PaulT+/C15:19, 9 April 2018 (UTC)
Thanks @Psantora:, I'll add a reply there, I reverted your edit to the template because I wanted people to be able to see the text you have an issue with in situ. John Cummings (talk) 10:22, 16 April 2018 (UTC)
Hello! After the successful pilot program by Wikimedia India in 2015, Wiki Loves Food (WLF) is happening again in 2018 and this year, it's going International. To make this event a grand success, your direction is key. Please sign up here as a volunteer to bring all the world's food to Wikimedia. Danidamiobi (talk) 07:22, 7 May 2018 (UTC)
Serbia report: Strong support from the Ministry of culture and information of Republic of Serbia: Financing the three WIR programs and realizing GLAM seminars
Sweden report: National museum of world Culture; Sounds and pronunciations; Nordic Museum
