This is an archive of past discussions with User:Mike Peel. 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.
Past: Wikidata team and volunteers were at 34C3. Check the videos, the tweets, a new design made by Bleeptrack for a cake. Videos of Wikidata-related workshops will be published soon.
A request for comment is in progress to determine whether the administrator policy should be amended to require disclosure of paid editing activity at WP:RFA and to prohibit the use of administrative tools as part of paid editing activity, with certain exceptions.
@Doc James: Ah, they used "<title>WITHDRAWN." rather than "<title>WITHDRAWN:". That's easily fixed by checking for "<title>WITHDRAWN", which I'll do from now on. Thanks. Mike Peel (talk) 15:56, 4 January 2018 (UTC)
This Month in Education: December 2017
This Month in Education
Volume 6 | Issue 11 | December 2017
This monthly newsletter showcases the Wikipedia Education Program. It focuses on sharing: your ideas, stories, success and challenges. You can see past editions here. You can also volunteer to help publish the newsletter. Join the team! Finally, don't forget to subscribe!
I second this barnstar, you beat me to it Doc James. Thanks Mike for all your help and expertise. I appreciate your time and your patience through the troubleshooting process to get it up and running. The bot is very impressive so far and I think adding the automatic archive function was a great idea. JenOttawa (talk) 21:23, 6 January 2018 (UTC)
Thanks! As a thought, @JenOttawa and Doc James:, would it be useful if the bot put together a separate list of the references to withdrawn articles (not tagging them inline, just listing them on a page)? Presumably there are reasons why they were withdrawn that might mean that the text they are referencing needs to be modified / itself withdrawn? It should be straightforward to do at the same time as checking the refs for the new non-withdrawn updates, but only makes sense if someone would then find the produced list useful. Thanks. Mike Peel (talk) 08:02, 7 January 2018 (UTC)
I have seen some items withdrawn as Cochrane feels it is simple out of date, not that their was anything actually wrong with the paper in question. Have brought this up with them and IMO this bit needs to be fixed first :-) Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 08:08, 7 January 2018 (UTC)
Wikidata weekly summary #294
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
Prevented checking of constraints on "Wikidata property example" statements (phabricator:T183267)
Added link to the property's talk page to the constraint violation dialog to guide people there to discuss the constraint if necessary (phabricator:T164351)
Monthly Tasks
Add labels, in your own language(s), for the new properties listed above.
Netherlands report: Historical aerial photographs from the Ministry of Defense; Texts on Dutch philosophers released under free license; Wikipedia manual; Images from Erfgoedhuis Zuid-Holland
Serbia report: Two Serbian museums welcomed their first Wikipedians in Residence
Hi Mike, I've read your WIkidata RFC and made a few tweaks. Overall I think it's very good and comprehensive - not much more I could add to it really. Aside from a couple of typo fixes, the main changes that I made were to the consequences sections for 2C and 2D. Here I expanded the examples a bit for clarity - I hope I didn't misinterpret what happens. Also, I amended the consequences for 4B which I think contained an error, but please can you check this and revert if necessary. The only other part that I think needs work is the "How reliable is Wikidata" section, which is just a list at present without full explanation. Cheers, Bazonka (talk) 21:30, 17 January 2018 (UTC)
Wikidata weekly summary #296
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
Discussions
Closed request for adminship: Mahir256 (as successful)
Constraint violations can now be checked on qualifiers and references (phab:T168532)
Implemented usage tracking deduplication to reduce database load (phab:T178079). This should not have any effect on what users see on recent changes and watchlists.
Redirects on client wikis that are connected to a Wikidata item can have a tracking category, if set up (phab:T185743). Thanks, Matěj!
What happens to the WD QID when a WP page gets moved - does the the WD QID follow the WP page to its new name or no?
The reason I ask is that it will determine my response at the bottom of Template talk:Taxonbar#Specifying the from/from1 parameter (which we might need a WD expert to look at...). If the QID follows the WP page, then the |from1= parameter in question is less useful/not needed. If the QID does not follow the WP page, then |from1= is useful/possibly required for long-term stability. Thanks. ~Tom.Reding (talk ⋅dgaf)21:08, 19 January 2018 (UTC)
@Tom.Reding: QIDs are designed to be as stable as possible (this is part of why they are numerical IDs, not names). So when a Wikipedia article is renamed, the QID remains the same, and it's just the sitelink that is updated (e.g., [2]). They *can* change if, for example, two topics were mixed together and are separated out into two different QIDs, or if two duplicates are merged together (in which case the lower number QID is normally kept, and the other is turned into a redirect, e.g., [3]/[4]). It's best *not* to specify a QID if you can, e.g. if you're using content on the same page that the QID is linked to, but it's normally fine to use it to fetch info from other QIDs if needed (although not too many times, as these have a performance overhead). Hope that helps? Thanks. Mike Peel (talk) 14:06, 20 January 2018 (UTC)
Thanks, that does help, and I'm tempted to say that the |from1= parameter I was referring to isn't needed. Just to be sure though, and because the taxonomy area of WP isn't as nice & neat as my example, could I get your thoughts on the above-linked discussion, particularly Peter coxhead's example starting at "Ok, so consider the follow."? ~Tom.Reding (talk ⋅dgaf)20:21, 20 January 2018 (UTC)
Sure, the QID doesn't change, but any editor can change at Wikidata the enwiki article that the QID links to, and we have no control over the change, which won't even show up to editors who have the enwiki article on their watchlist. Peter coxhead (talk) 22:03, 20 January 2018 (UTC)
@Peter coxhead: Do you have "Preferences" -> "Watchlist" -> "Show Wikidata edits in your watchlist" turned on? I just tried unlinking Mark III (radio telescope) and adding it back, and in my watchlist I can see an edit with the message "This page has been unlinked from Wikidata item. Language links removed." followed by "A Wikidata item has been linked to this page.". Here's a screenshot:
@Mike Peel: sure, if an editor sets the preference, then a change to the direct link shows up, but how many editors have this set? My watchlist is already far too long. Also you have to watch the Wikidata entry itself to see other relevant changes that show up in the taxonbar or the left margin of an article. As for no control, it's not a matter of individual edits, but the whole way Wikidata is set up and the stance it takes on taxonomy. Anyway, enough on this matter from me. Peter coxhead (talk) 21:01, 23 January 2018 (UTC)
@Peter coxhead: If it's a big concern, then we could always start an RfC to enable that preference by default. But then, yes, your watchlist would become longer - you can't have both things simultaneously! The other relevant changes should also appear in the watchlist in the same way... I don't understand your point about 'the whole way Wikidata is set up', and in "the stance it takes on taxonomy" I'm assuming "it" means "the editors there" - that'll only change through discussion with those editors, the same way as it works here. ;-) Thanks. Mike Peel (talk) 21:10, 23 January 2018 (UTC)
The watchlist thing is getting away from the issue though, or at best it's an unrobust/uncomfortable solution. Yes, at some level, we have to trust other editors, and most editors are ok with that when changes are made internally to en.wiki, but we lose some confidence when relying on activities behind the relatively opaque curtain at WD. Adding the |from1= parameter would basically serve as a starting point for the 'history' of each page's WD QID assignment, visible/checkable to/by a much broader audience (en.wiki) than WD (i.e. is it different from the current QID? what changed? oh let me find out, etc.). You're right about bringing it up to the WD taxonomy people - just need to figure out where that is... I tried searching a bit but am just lost. ~Tom.Reding (talk ⋅dgaf)04:35, 24 January 2018 (UTC)
This monthly newsletter showcases the Wikipedia Education Program. It focuses on sharing: your ideas, stories, success and challenges. You can see past editions here. You can also volunteer to help publish the newsletter. Join the team! Finally, don't forget to subscribe!
An RfC has closed with a consensus that candidates at WP:RFA must disclose whether they have ever edited for pay and that administrators may never use administrative tools as part of any paid editing activity, except when they are acting as a Wikipedian-in-Residence or when the payment is made by the Wikimedia Foundation or an affiliate of the WMF.
Editors responding to threats of harm can now contact the Wikimedia Foundation's emergency address by using Special:EmailUser/Emergency. If you don't have email enabled on Wikipedia, directly contacting the emergency address using your own email client remains an option.
Technical news
A tagwill now be automatically applied to edits that blank a page, turn a page into a redirect, remove/replace almost all content in a page, undo an edit, or rollback an edit. These edits were previously denoted solely by automatic edit summaries.
Arbitration
The Arbitration Committee has enacted a change to the discretionary sanctions procedure which requires administrators to add a standardizededitnotice when placing page restrictions. Editors cannot be sanctioned for violations of page restrictions if this editnotice was not in place at the time of the violation.
From the life of Wikidata: with the Wikidata Concepts Monitor we can now begin to discover how our communities use knowledge across the Wikimedia projects, by Goran S. Milovanović
See also: WDCM Journal, several examples of the use of Wikidata on the Wikimedia projects
We are saddened to report that Polish Wikimedian Krzysztof Machocki (who was also active on Wikidata) died on 31 January 2018, aged 36, after a couple of weeks of illness. Our condolences to his family and friends.
The call for submissions for Wikimania (Cape Town, July 2018) is now open. Deadline is March 18th. Ideas of submissions related to Wikidata can be discussed here
Based on community discussions, the ArticlePlaceholder will soon be deployed on Urdu and Estonian Wikipedias.
Statistics
January 2018 brought us 9,770,248 edits, 445,027 new items were created.
The number of users that edited Wikidata per day grew in 2017 from 2439 to 2672 users, 9,6% more compared to 2016. The number of edits by them grew with 18% to 190k edits per day. We also get edited by 542 IP adresses per day, 50% more than in 2016.
In 2017, Wikidata got edited by 46 various bots per day, executing 334k edits per day (63% more than in 2016). The most active bot in 2017 was Emijrpbot, who added 18 million edits to Wikidata.
