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Facto Post – Issue 6 – 15 November 2017

WikidataCon Berlin 28–9 October 2017

WikidataCon 2017 group photo

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.

WD-FIST explained

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.

Wikidata's fifth birthday party on the Sunday brought matters to a close. See a dozen and more reports by other hands.

Links

Editor Charles Matthews. Please leave feedback for him.

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Newsletter delivered by MediaWiki message delivery MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 10:02, 15 November 2017 (UTC)

Template:Infobox voivod listed at Redirects for discussion

An editor has asked for a discussion to address the redirect Template:Infobox voivod. Since you had some involvement with the Template:Infobox voivod redirect, you might want to participate in the redirect discussion if you have not already done so. Steel1943 (talk) 16:13, 16 November 2017 (UTC)

Nomination for deletion of Template:WSJ topic

Template:WSJ topic has been nominated for deletion. You are invited to comment on the discussion at the template's entry on the Templates for discussion page. Alsee (talk) 17:04, 16 November 2017 (UTC)

Speedy deletion nomination of Template:Infobox Montenegro

If this is the first article that you have created, you may want to read the guide to writing your first article.

You may want to consider using the Article Wizard to help you create articles.

A tag has been placed on Template:Infobox Montenegro, requesting that it be speedily deleted from Wikipedia. This has been done under section G4 of the criteria for speedy deletion, because the page appears to be a repost of material that was previously deleted following a deletion discussion, such as at Articles for Deletion. When a page has substantially identical content to that of a page deleted after a discusion, and any changes in the content do not address the reasons for which the material was previously deleted, it may be deleted at any time.

If you think this page should not be deleted for this reason, you may contest the nomination by visiting the page and clicking the button labelled "Contest this speedy deletion". This will give you the opportunity to explain why you believe the page should not be deleted. However, be aware that once a page is tagged for speedy deletion, it may be deleted without delay. Please do not remove the speedy deletion tag from the page yourself, but do not hesitate to add information in line with Wikipedia's policies and guidelines. If the page is deleted, and you wish to retrieve the deleted material for future reference or improvement, then please contact the deleting administrator, or if you have already done so, you can place a request here. jd22292 (Jalen D. Folf) (talk • contribs) 18:17, 16 November 2017 (UTC)

Speedy deletion nomination of Template:Infobox Sri Lankan Administrative District

If this is the first article that you have created, you may want to read the guide to writing your first article.

You may want to consider using the Article Wizard to help you create articles.

A tag has been placed on Template:Infobox Sri Lankan Administrative District, requesting that it be speedily deleted from Wikipedia. This has been done under section G4 of the criteria for speedy deletion, because the page appears to be a repost of material that was previously deleted following a deletion discussion, such as at Articles for Deletion. When a page has substantially identical content to that of a page deleted after a discusion, and any changes in the content do not address the reasons for which the material was previously deleted, it may be deleted at any time.

If you think this page should not be deleted for this reason, you may contest the nomination by visiting the page and clicking the button labelled "Contest this speedy deletion". This will give you the opportunity to explain why you believe the page should not be deleted. However, be aware that once a page is tagged for speedy deletion, it may be deleted without delay. Please do not remove the speedy deletion tag from the page yourself, but do not hesitate to add information in line with Wikipedia's policies and guidelines. If the page is deleted, and you wish to retrieve the deleted material for future reference or improvement, then please contact the deleting administrator, or if you have already done so, you can place a request here. jd22292 (Jalen D. Folf) (talk • contribs) 18:18, 16 November 2017 (UTC)

Really? How tedious. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 18:34, 16 November 2017 (UTC)

Tech News: 2017-47

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent changes

  • If you use the Chrome web browser on Android you can see a download icon on the mobile website. You can download a formatted PDF. It will work in other mobile browsers in the future. [1]
  • The abuse filter now has a function called get_matches. You can use it to store matches from regular expressions – one of each capturing group. You can read more in Phabricator.

Problems

  • Last week's MediaWiki version didn't come to all Wikipedias because of a database crash. It will be on all wikis on 20 November. [2][3][4]

Changes later this week

  • There is no new MediaWiki version this week.

Meetings

  • You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 21 November at 19:30 (UTC). See how to join.
  • You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 22 November at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

  • Language converter syntax will no longer work inside external links. Wikitext like http://-{zh-cn:foo.com; zh-hk:bar.com; zh-tw:baz.com}- must be replaced. You will have to write -{zh-cn: http://foo.com ; zh-hk: http://bar.com ; zh-tw:http://baz.com }- instead. This only affects languages with Language Converter enabled. Examples of such languages are Chinese and Serbian. This will happen next week. [5][6]

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

19:19, 20 November 2017 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #287

Wikidata weekly summary #287 Global message delivery/Targets/Wikidata

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Development
    • Fixed Commons media suggester not loading all preview thumbnails (phabricator:T160528)
    • RDF exports can handle entity references to foreign Wikibase repositories now, needed for Structured Data on Commons (phabricator:T161592)
    • Worked on making statements on Forms editable and persistent (phabricator:T163724)
    • Worked on fine-grained usage tracking in Wikibase' Lua library (phabricator:T172914)
    • Worked on caching constraint check results (phabricator:T179849) and indicating when constraint check results are cached (phabricator:T179844)
    • Wikibase code base does not use Composer class autoloading any more (phabricator:T180067) as another step towards getting rid of our own build process and being more in line with the rest of Wikimedia
Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) 10:29, 21 November 2017 (UTC)

The Signpost: 24 November 2017

* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 02:39, 24 November 2017 (UTC)

Archives

Hi, I am new to Wikipedia editing but am very keen to develop a strategy for embedding links to Archives (especially the one I work at) in Wikipedia articles; are there already any basic guidelines for this, as I can see a number of potential approaches and don't want to re-invent the wheel. Chinbrad (talk) 16:23, 20 November 2017 (UTC)

PS I have now been guided to an article in The Wikipedia Library on this very subject (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:The_Wikipedia_Library/Cultural_Professionals) and I am browsing the GLAM pages too. I'll come back if I have any problems... Chinbrad (talk) 08:53, 21 November 2017 (UTC)

OK, please do. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 10:24, 21 November 2017 (UTC)

Well I haven't got very far. What I was hoping to do was to indicate on various historical articles that we, Durham County Record Office, are the holder of the primary source material on that subject. (I would also indicate where other repositories have relevant collections). For one thing the "cite archive" tag doesn't seem to work properly. I also can't find any other examples of people doing this. I realise that references to primary sources are not preferred in Wikipedia, but it seemed to me that it would be helpful to point people to the archives where appropriate. I am going to expand our own article anyway to direct people to articles on subjects we deal with, but I'd also it seemed a good idea to supply reverse links on some of those pages to us (probably to our Wikipedia article, which has a link to our website, unless we already have material online to go directly to as a citation). The bottom line is that we hold important documents of a wide public interest and naturally want to increase use of these by any means, but we have very little online content to link to. An example where we do have online material is pl:Paweł Salwator Piast-Riedelski; and example where we do not is George Bowes. Chinbrad (talk) 14:19, 24 November 2017 (UTC)

@Chinbrad: First and foremost, be sure to comply with Wikipedia's polices on Conflicts of interest and paid editing (let me know if you need advice on those; I'm happy to chat offline - email me if you wish to do so). You may do best to put a list of your significant holdings on your user page, and invite people to add details to articles; or to post such suggestions on article talk pages. As for templates not working, examples are always helpful. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 15:49, 24 November 2017 (UTC)

Thanks for your comments. I should probably have mentioned that I've just been at a Wikimedia training day for Heritage Science, at Edinburgh, led by Doug (an archaeologist); this followed a year or so of pondering how I could contribute professionally to Wikipedia. We didn't have time to discuss all the issues that had concerned me but we certainly talked about being open and honest in talk pages. General opinion was that archivists (and museum staff and other professionals) had a lot to expertise to offer to Wikipedia but not previously much encouragement to do it; in our case the conflict of interest could be avoided by stating clearly what you were doing and where you were coming from. Doug thought that it was better to put links directly from articles to one's own website so as to add to WikiData, but I confess I didn't fully understand this. I'll keep trying with "cite archive" but the problem seems to be that we don't usually have webpages devoted to different collections: everything is in an online catalgue database... Chinbrad (talk) 20:43, 24 November 2017 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #288

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Development
    • Result views in the Wikidata Query Service UI can now be configured with options (phabricator:T155973, Special:Diff/580233265/596922582)
    • Worked more on introducing the concept of sub.entities in the APIs in order to make edits to Forms persistent
    • Worked on edit summaries for edits to Forms

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here.



Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lea Lacroix (WMDE) 15:44, 27 November 2017 (UTC)

Tech News: 2017-48

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent changes

Changes later this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 28 November. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 29 November. It will be on all wikis from 30 November (calendar).

Meetings

  • You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 28 November at 19:30 (UTC). See how to join.
  • You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 29 November at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

20:30, 27 November 2017 (UTC)

Cosmic award

The Space Barnstar
For getting an astronaut to talk to Wikipedia from Earth orbit. Cosmic congrats! — JFG talk 21:17, 1 December 2017 (UTC)

ArbCom 2017 election voter message

Hello, Pigsonthewing. 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.

If you wish to participate in the 2017 election, please review the candidates and submit your choices on the voting page. MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 18:42, 3 December 2017 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #289

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Development
    • Wikidata will get dedicated database resources, and go read-only for 30 minutes on 9th January 2018 (phabricator:T181645)
    • There were no RDF dumps last week due to problems generating them, investigation is still going on (phabricator:T181385)
    • Improved the threshold for ORES on Wikidata (phabricator:T180450)
    • Working on fixing a regression after a change in MediaWiki core that makes edit links show up on diff pages (phabricator:T181807)
    • More work on persistent editing of statements on Forms of a Lexeme (specifically phabricator:T180467)
    • Improved size of the diff that we sent to Wikipedia and co for changes happening on Wikidata. This is one more needed step towards only showing meaningful edits in the watchlists and recent changes there. (phabricator:T113468)

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here.


Read the full report · Unsubscribe · Lea Lacroix (WMDE) 16:31, 4 December 2017 (UTC)

Tech News: 2017-49

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Recent changes

Changes later this week

  • The new version of MediaWiki will be on test wikis and MediaWiki.org from 5 December. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis and some Wikipedias from 6 December. It will be on all wikis from 7 December (calendar).
  • Very old versions of the Opera Web browser are no longer supported. This means that technical development will not be tested to make sure it works with those Opera versions. Use Opera 15 or above or another browser if you have problems. [13]
  • Almost 170 wikis with no high-priority errors in Linter categories will switch to use the Remex parsing library. This is to replace Tidy. A few larger wikis such as German and Italian Wikipedia will also make this switch. It will happen on 5 December. Other wikis will be recommended to switch soon when they have fixed the errors that must be fixed. Tidy will be removed in the middle of 2018. [14][15]

Meetings

  • You can join the next meeting with the Editing team. During the meeting, you can tell developers which bugs you think are the most important. The meeting will be on 5 December at 19:30 (UTC). See how to join.
  • You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting will be on 6 December at 16:00 (UTC). See how to join.

Future changes

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

17:51, 4 December 2017 (UTC)

Talkback

Hello, Pigsonthewing. You have new messages at Shyamal's talk page.
Message added 16:18, 4 December 2017 (UTC). You can remove this notice at any time by removing the {{Talkback}} or {{Tb}} template.

Winged Blades Godric 16:18, 4 December 2017 (UTC)

Reading through your views across different places, it seems that you have been a quite-vocal critic of AfC, since long back.So, as advised at Shyamal's t/p, we I expect that you would kindly bring all instances of erroneous reviewing that made you lose faith in the process, to our kind attention and ultimately help in the betterment of AfC.Regards:) Thankfully, Winged Blades Godric 10:26, 5 December 2017 (UTC)
@Winged Blades of Godric: Given the vitriolic - not to say dishonest - personal attacks made on- and off- wiki in response to my doing so previously, by some of your AfC colleagues and their supporters, I am sure that you will understand why I shall be cautious in doing so. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 12:12, 5 December 2017 (UTC)
Hmm..Sorry, I did not know of any such untoward incident and condemn it.It seems from your previous statement that you have brought such erroneous reviews to the forefront at some on-wiki venue previously. Can you please provide a link to such discussions. Alternatively, you may choose to email Primefac or me.Regards:)Winged Blades Godric 12:20, 5 December 2017 (UTC)
For what it's worth, I'm assuming that's the royal "we", since I expect nothing. I've always respected your opinions, Andy, and I'm always happy to discuss things with you. Primefac (talk) 12:31, 5 December 2017 (UTC)
I actually sought the erroneous reviews because Andy is clearly a much-experienced contributor and even a minimum feedback/observation from him w.r.t particular set of AFC reviews/reviewers would channelize the often-minimal oversight in a more clear path and lead to the betterment of the process.Winged Blades Godric 12:49, 5 December 2017 (UTC)
AfC is just a lazy review process that does nothing to improve the quality of articles nor encourage or retain new editors. The first article I pick from those waiting for months Fiona O'Carroll sat there for two months before a receiving a lazy review that said one peacock term hugely popular which I changed to popular was enough to reject the article. Another pile on review said 3 sources wasnt enough to establish notability I added two more IMDB and News out in Ireland, also found out the person had a top 10 single. Tell me how does AfC work any different from AfD/prod/CSD and every other process thats just there to delete content. Gnangarra 13:40, 5 December 2017 (UTC)
Gnangarra, there are just so many things wrong with your comment. First off, it was only declined once, for only having one reference. The other comments were just that - comments. Second, the first decline said that one reference wasn't necessary - where is "three" coming from? Fourth, the draft at the time you moved it was acceptable, and I would assume that had it actually received a review it would have been accepted. The issue is that we have about 2500 drafts to review and only about 120 people doing the reviewing, so sometimes drafts sit around for a while. Fifth, IMDb is not and never will be a reliable source, so I have removed it. Primefac (talk) 13:51, 5 December 2017 (UTC)
IMDB is a commonly used reference, it had 3 reviews and 3 citations in the article, comment or review each look exactly the same not one of them had substance. They were all lazy, useless responses that did nothing to improve the article or help the person who wrote it improve their contributions. On top that it took 2 months for those response to even be posted seriously that is totally unacceptable on all counts. If AfC wants to help new editors the process needs to be completed with in days or hours if the new editor is active because new people dont wait two months for a response. Those over worked 120 reviewers arent achieving the aim of helping new people create articles, the process is just too convoluted hence the back log, the long lag times, and poor reviews/comments. There is nothing to make AfC worthy of hanging onto any longer new contributors are more valuable than keeping a process going beyond its capacity. Gnangarra 14:07, 5 December 2017 (UTC)
Commonly used?Replying in more details soon.Winged Blades Godric 14:10, 5 December 2017 (UTC)

(edit conflict) If you have a better idea of how we can deal with all of the garbage that comes through AFC in order to find the chestnuts, by all means post your suggestions on WT:AFC. Otherwise, you're just blowing hot air around. I'd love to have 500 or so AFC reviewers so that we could get the backlog down, but unless you know of some way to motivate people that I don't, the situation isn't likely to change. And yes, per Godric, IMDb is basically disallowed to the point of not being useful. Primefac (talk) 14:14, 5 December 2017 (UTC)

So your response to someone pointing out just some of the problems with AfC, and providing the kind of example that you yourself requested, is to accuse them of "blowing hot air around"? Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 14:24, 5 December 2017 (UTC)
and there is the rub, Otherwise, you're just blowing hot air around yep lots of hot air it helps things rise where as pouring cold water just sinks everything. I gave you my answer its the process that has failed, there no way to fix it in its current form and prevent the damage that its doing to those of us who spend 100's if not 1,000's of hours doing outreach work picking through the pieces showing people they dont need to beg to make an article. The whole point is deal with the garbage, but dont waste valuable opportunities on nonsensical demands that take months. Simplify the process dont expect or demand GA quality who really cares if an article starts by by saying hugely popular or just popular AfC is not and should never be trying to be FAC or even GAC. If doesnt need deleting pass it, AfC doesnt need check lists and tags, and review after review, comment after comment. If the subject is notable the article will be edited and expanded over time get out the way and let anyone, everyone contribute thats what made Wikipedia great in the first place. Gnangarra 14:34, 5 December 2017 (UTC)
I did ask for feedback, but "it's broken and should be thrown away" is just hot air unless you actually plan on formally proposing that change. To anyone who has looked at the backlog over the last two months it's painfully obvious that we need more folks helping out. We don't expect perfection in drafts, and I've accepted quite a few drafts that I personally don't feel are good enough but meet our specifications. Currently only 9% of drafts accepted through AFC are nominated for deletion, which compared to NPR (which deletes or nominates probably 20% of the articles it sees) is a pretty damn good percentage. With 2500 drafts currently in the process there are bound to be outliers (bad declines or inappropriate acceptances), but rather than cherry pick those drafts to point how incredibly flawed the process is we need to look at the overall results - a boatload of garbage has been kept from making it into the article space.
As for your comment If the subject is notable the article will be edited and expanded over time - that's absolutely true, but if someone presents a draft with insufficient referencing for the reviewer to determine if notability is even remotely viable, then it should be declined. I've declined (and deleted) a host of articles that looked like the subject was notable but turned out were complete fabrications with enough bombardment to try and sneak it through.
I agree that a two-month review period is too long, but there's nothing we can do to change that. NPR is backlogged six months (with 13k articles) but no one is calling for it to be disbanded. Even if we were to get rid of AFC entirely we'd just shift the burden onto NPR, which would then dramatically increase the burden on AFD (since pages would have to be nominated for deletion instead of just declined) and the quality of Wikipedia would dovetail sharply.
There are small changes that can be implemented within the project itself if it's a viable suggestion, but when I have to defend the project as a whole we stop discussing improvement and instead just argue that it is or isn't a valuable waste of time. Clearly neither side is going to convince the other that it should or shouldn't be nuked, which is why I was trying to get down to brass tacks and find what specifically should be worked on. "Reviewers need to leave better feedback" is productive, and it's something that we've been trying to work on recently. Primefac (talk) 14:53, 5 December 2017 (UTC)
(edit conflict):::Gnaggara, you are so pathetically wrong and ill-knowledged over almost everything at your first point, that I doubt whether you know enough about the workflow of AfC machinery or are taking some random potshots at the process.Anyways, PFac had contradicted it quite well.Your second point is quite better and addresses a genuine point--about the delay of an average review of an average article.But, what you are going for is the Nirvana fallacy.We don't wiki-live in an utopia and neither shall you think something along the lines of that.If you have any plan to bolster the number of contributors to AfC, we are all ears but otherwise it's really just hot airs.You spent valuable time doing outreach work and we spend equally valuable time cleaning up all the spams about garage-bands, startups and obviously the mess of some of those specialised outreach eventsRemember outreaches in areas of Indian Castes etc? and thus have an equal right to look for reducing the frontline workload at NPP.Also, unless we reside in alternate realities, AFC isn't remotely trying FAC/GAC.Finally, by If doesnt need deleting pass it iff you are proposing that AFC works like a CSD screening mechanism, start a RFC, generate consensus and the flock will happily abide by or participate at Wikipedia:Village pump (idea lab)/Archive 24#Time to call time on the Articles For Creation experiment.Regards:)Winged Blades Godric 15:11, 5 December 2017 (UTC)
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