User talk:Pigsonthewing/Archive 60
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WikiProject X Newsletter • Issue 2
For this month's issue...
Making sense of a lot of data.
Work on our prototype will begin imminently. In the meantime, we have to understand what exactly we're working with. To this end, we generated a list of 71 WikiProjects, based on those brought up on our Stories page and those who had signed up for pilot testing. For those projects where people told stories, we coded statements within those stories to figure out what trends there were in these stories. This approach allowed us to figure out what Wikipedians thought of WikiProjects in a very organic way, with very little by way of a structure. (Compare this to a structured interview, where specific questions are asked and answered.) This analysis was done on 29 stories. Codes were generally classified as "benefits" (positive contributions made by a WikiProject to the editing experience) and "obstacles" (issues posed by WikiProjects, broadly speaking). Codes were generated as I went along, ensuring that codes were as close to the original data as possible. Duplicate appearances of a code for a given WikiProject were removed.
We found 52 "benefit" statements encoded and 34 "obstacle" statements. The most common benefit statement referring to the project's active discussion and participation, followed by statements referring to a project's capacity to guide editor activity, while the most common obstacles made reference to low participation and significant burdens on the part of the project maintainers and leaders. This gives us a sense of WikiProjects' big strength: they bring people together, and can be frustrating to editors when they fail to do so. Meanwhile, it is indeed very difficult to bring editors together on a common interest; in the absence of a highly motivated core of organizers, the technical infrastructure simply isn't there.
We wanted to pair this qualitative study with quantitative analysis of a WikiProject and its "universe" of pages, discussions, templates, and categories. To this end I wrote a script called ProjAnalysis which will, for a given WikiProject page (e.g. Wikipedia:WikiProject Star Trek) and WikiProject talk-page tag (e.g. Template:WikiProject Star Trek), will give you a list of usernames of people who edited within the WikiProject's space (the project page itself, its talk page, and subpages), and within the WikiProject's scope (the pages tagged by that WikiProject, excluding the WikiProject space pages). The output is an exhaustive list of usernames. We ran the script to analyze our test batch of WikiProjects for edits between March 1, 2014 and February 28, 2015, and we subjected them to further analysis to only include those who made 10+ edits to pages in the projects' scope, those who made 4+ edits to the projects' space, and those who made 10+ edits to pages in scope but not 4+ edits to pages in the projects' space. This latter metric gives us an idea of who is active in a certain subject area of Wikipedia, yet who isn't actively engaging on the WikiProject's pages. This information will help us prioritize WikiProjects for pilot testing, and the ProjAnalysis script in general may have future life as an application that can be used by Wikipedians to learn about who is in their community.
Complementing the above two studies are a design analysis, which summarizes the structure of the different WikiProject spaces in our test batch, and the comprehensive census of bots and tools used to maintain WikiProjects, which will be finished soon. With all of this information, we will have a game plan in place! We hope to begin working with specific WikiProjects soon.
As a couple of asides...
- Database Reports has existed for several years on Wikipedia to the satisfaction of many, but many of the reports stopped running when the Toolserver was shut off in 2014. However, there is good news: the weekly New WikiProjects and WikiProjects by Changes reports are back, with potential future reports in the future.
- WikiProject X has an outpost on Wikidata! Check it out. It's not widely publicized, but we are interested in using Wikidata as a potential repository for metadata about WikiProjects, especially for WikiProjects that exist on multiple Wikimedia projects and language editions.
That's all for now. Thank you for subscribing! If you have any questions or comments, please share them with us.
Harej (talk) 01:43, 21 March 2015 (UTC)
The Signpost: 18 March 2015
- From the editor: A salute to Pine
- Featured content: A woman who loved kings
- Traffic report: It's not cricket
.
Disambiguation link notification for March 21
Hi. Thank you for your recent edits. Wikipedia appreciates your help. We noticed though that when you edited Margaret Lefranc, you added a link pointing to the disambiguation page Santa Fe. Such links are almost always unintended, since a disambiguation page is merely a list of "Did you mean..." article titles. Read the FAQ • Join us at the DPL WikiProject.
It's OK to remove this message. Also, to stop receiving these messages, follow these opt-out instructions. Thanks, DPL bot (talk) 09:43, 21 March 2015 (UTC)
Wikidata weekly summary #150
- Events/Blogs/Press
- Past: Editathon at MACBA
- Past: Wikidata intro session for Wikipedians at Lokal K in Cologne
- Upcoming: Wikidata editing at Wikimedia Germany in Berlin
- Upcoming: Office hour on 31st of March (Topics include Freebase migration, dev update, admin inactivity criteria)
- Other Noteworthy Stuff
- Freebase is going read-only at the end of the month and we expect an influx of new people. There is now an FAQ to answer their most common questions.
- We now have (improved) landing pages for partners at d:Wikidata:Data donation and d:Wikidata:Data access. Could use some help with making them easier to read and more visual.
- Lots of improvements around MixNMatch. It has a new catalog overview page. ~340K IDs have been matched so far with it and it now has an FAQ for institutions wanting to get their identifiers linked in Wikidata
- There is a fancy new tool to help with patrolling edits on Wikidata
- First screenshot of the primary sources tool that'll help with migrating data from Freebase and enriching it with references has been leaked ;-): 1 and 2
- DBpedia converts Wikidata data to the DBpedia ontology
- Another 3rd-party SPARQL endpoint has been set up for testing
- Did you know?
- Newest properties: art-name, posthumous name, temple name, courtesy name, school of, possible creator, forgery after, manner of, circle of, follower of, workshop of, attributed to, USDA plant identifier, Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System identifier, LMI code, denkXweb identifier, place name sign
- Newest WikiProjects: Municipalities of Germany
- Newest gadgets: Image search supports the new "place name sign" property
- Development
- Fixed property suggestions on empty items
- Updated database for property suggestions with newest correlations so you should get better suggestions
- Updated various documentation
- Continued working on RDF export (among other things a requirement for query functionality)
- Polishing in the user interface
- Monthly Tasks
- Hack on one of these.
- Help fix these items which have been flagged using Wikidata - The Game.
- Help develop the next summary here!
- Contribute to a Showcase item
- Help translate or proofread pages in your own language!
Request
Please, can you remove the TfD banner from {{Infobox school}}? I only noticed that it's template-protected after I closed the discussion, but it'd be counterproductive to reopen it. Alakzi (talk) 17:28, 22 March 2015 (UTC)
- @Alakzi:. Done. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 17:29, 22 March 2015 (UTC)
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Changes this week
- The new version of MediaWiki has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since March 18. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from March 24. It will be on all Wikipedias from March 25 (calendar).
- The text of a reference is now more visible when you click on it. It has a blue background. Many wikis already have the blue color. Those wikis can now remove it from their CSS page. [1]
- VisualEditor is now much faster. For many users it is now at least as fast as the wikitext editor. [2] [3] [4]
- When you add a list of references in VisualEditor, you now see it right away. You can still change its group by editing it. [5]
Meetings
- You can read the notes from the last meeting with the VisualEditor team.
- You can join the next weekly meeting with the VisualEditor team. During the meetings you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on March 25 at 19:00 (UTC). See how to join.
Future changes
- Talk pages using "LiquidThreads" on mediawiki.org will soon use the new system. [6]
Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
15:10, 23 March 2015 (UTC)
Talk subpage /VIAF
Hi Andy. Thanks for the notice. (Maybe I did "thank" you automatically several hours ago. The system is unfamiliar to me and I was taken aback by the request for confirmation of "public" thanks.)
Wikipedia talk:Authority control/VIAF is now on my watchlist. When underway and productive, perhaps there should be a cross-reference notice at Wikipedia talk:VIAF/errors (inactive but I posted this week) and Template talk:Authority control (active)? --P64 (talk) 22:17, 25 March 2015 (UTC)
Commons category template
Hi, this change appears to have broken a large number of links, at a guess 600, to Commons categories in articles. It strips out the qualifier which is needed to get the correct entry on Commons where no argument is specified for the template. I am unsure what you are trying to do so have not reverted for now. Keith D (talk) 13:48, 26 March 2015 (UTC)
- He meant to hide the qualifier from the displayed text, which should be done like this (line 6):
-->|{{{2|{{PAGENAMEBASE|{{{1|}}}}}}}}<!--
. Alakzi (talk) 14:01, 26 March 2015 (UTC)- @Alakzi: That didn't work. Note that I only changed PAGENAME to PAGENAMEBASE; I'd be surrised if that casues the effect described. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 16:19, 26 March 2015 (UTC)
- See the testcases. Is that what you wanted? Alakzi (talk) 16:37, 26 March 2015 (UTC)
- Will check later; thanks. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 17:38, 26 March 2015 (UTC)
- See the testcases. Is that what you wanted? Alakzi (talk) 16:37, 26 March 2015 (UTC)
- @Alakzi: That didn't work. Note that I only changed PAGENAME to PAGENAMEBASE; I'd be surrised if that casues the effect described. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 16:19, 26 March 2015 (UTC)
- @Keith D: Sorry about that. When reporting bugs or other issues, please give an example or two. The point of the edit is that, when no argument is given, the value is supplied from Wikidata. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 16:19, 26 March 2015 (UTC)
- Not a good idea to use wikidata as a source at the moment with the number of items that are incorrect either where the mapping of our wiki article to wikidata is incorrect or there is no equivalent and the nearest has been picked, usually by a BOT or the Commons entry on wikidata is wrong etc. Continual page moves make the situation worse. I have spent over a year trying to sort out the mess and barely scratched the surface as yet. Keith D (talk) 17:17, 26 March 2015 (UTC)
- Again; please give examples. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 17:38, 26 March 2015 (UTC)
- Not a good idea to use wikidata as a source at the moment with the number of items that are incorrect either where the mapping of our wiki article to wikidata is incorrect or there is no equivalent and the nearest has been picked, usually by a BOT or the Commons entry on wikidata is wrong etc. Continual page moves make the situation worse. I have spent over a year trying to sort out the mess and barely scratched the surface as yet. Keith D (talk) 17:17, 26 March 2015 (UTC)
The Signpost – Volume 11, Issue 12 – 25 March 2015
- News and notes: Wikimedia Foundation adopts open-access research policy
- Featured content: A carnival of animals, a river of dung, a wasteland of uncles, and some people with attitude
- Special report: Wikimedia Commons Picture of the Year 2014
- Traffic report: Oddly familiar
- Recent research: Most important people; respiratory reliability; academic attitudes
The Bugle: Issue CVIII, March 2015
|
The Bugle is published by the Military history WikiProject. To receive it on your talk page, please join the project or sign up here.
If you are a project member who does not want delivery, please remove your name from this page. Your editors, Ian Rose (talk) and Nick-D (talk) 09:37, 27 March 2015 (UTC)
Aposematic genuses?
Hi, I think this should probably be not Category:Aposematic genuses but Category:Aposematic genera. See genus for plural. All the best, Chiswick Chap (talk) 20:04, 28 March 2015 (UTC)
- @Chiswick Chap: Thanks; I was just moving it as I got notification of your message. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 20:15, 28 March 2015 (UTC)
Wikidata weekly summary #151
- Events/Blogs/Press
- Other Noteworthy Stuff
- The next steps for the header redesign and bugfixes are live
- New tool by Magnus that lets you add reference URLs with a single click
- An update from Freebase (which is going read-only on Tuesday!)
- The tours are working again thanks to Bene* and Lucie
- Effort to define a biomedical relationship ontology for Wikidata
- Eventzoom.net - displaying history from Wikidata on maps
- Did you know?
- Newest properties: ABoK number, Word Health Organisation International Nonproprietary Name, Danish National Filmography ID, Masaryk University person ID, EMLO person identifier, Commemorative plaque image, Wikimedia database name, Maltese Islands National Inventory of Cultural Property identifier, ISO 639-5, International Standard Industrial Classification code, Smithsonian American Art Museum: person/institution thesaurus id, bureau du patrimoine de Seine-Saint-Denis ID, format as a regular expression, category of associated people, category of people buried here, BioStor author identifier, chief operating officer, DVN identifier
- Newest WikiProjects:
- Newest gadgets: Image search can find photos for the new "commemorative plaque image" property
- New task forces: Dictionary of National Biography (DNB)
- There is a SpecialPage to easily get to the Wikidata item for a given Wikipedia article and another one to get to the Wikipedia article for a given Wikidata ID.
- Development
- Deployed new code to Wikidata \o/ (and fixed a few issues that popped up)
- Made good progress on RDF export (needed for example for queries)
- Did more performance groundwork for arbitrary access
- Students working on improved constraint reports and checking against 3rd party databases are making good progress
- Looked into improving suggestions
- Worked on making dispatching changes from Wikidata to Wikipedia and co more robust
- Removed backwards compatibility from
mw.wikibase.getEntity()
, to be deployed April 7 and 8. See also here. - Improved support for right-to-left languages, e.g. in the sitelinks view
- Created a unit test framework for special pages
- Monthly Tasks
- Hack on one of these.
- Help fix these items which have been flagged using Wikidata - The Game.
- Help develop the next summary here!
- Contribute to a Showcase item
- Help translate or proofread pages in your own language!
- Add multi-lingual labels for the new properties listed above.
Next meetups in North England
Hello. Would you be interested in attending one of the next wikimeets in the north of England? They will take place in:
- Leeds on 12th April 2015
- Manchester on 26th April 2015
- Liverpool on 24th May 2015
If you can make them, please sign up on the relevant wikimeet page!
If you want to receive future notifications about these wikimeets, then please add your name to the notification list (or remove it if you're already on the list and you don't want to receive future notifications!)
Thanks. Mike Peel (talk) 20:39, 28 March 2015 (UTC)
Stylesheet changes
I think I can see why we've got all of these infobox utility templates: nothing ever gets fixed in the stylesheet. Alakzi (talk) 23:46, 28 March 2015 (UTC)
- @Alakzi: I can understand your frustration, I see the same in other areas, not just CSS. I have one change which passed an RfC about three years ago, but is stonewalled by a couple of editors. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 08:48, 29 March 2015 (UTC)
ACS meeting
Andy,
Yes - I do need an abstract, and the deadline is by tonight! I was hoping you'd hear whether you could come or not, and also, what you'd like to talk about! If you think it likely that you'll attend, please submit an abstract and we can withdraw it tomorrow if you have to cancel. (On March 31 the program goes over to ACS central office for printing, etc.) But I'm guessing that since you haven't heard yet, it's not looking good. Unfortunately, the system ACS has is very rigid, and I've been told that even symposium organisers can't add abstracts after the deadline. Thanks, Walkerma (talk) 17:54, 29 March 2015 (UTC)
- Thanks! Enjoy your trip! Walkerma (talk) 22:19, 29 March 2015 (UTC)
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
- You can now hide site banners even if you don't have an account. [7]
- You can now add citations more easily with VisualEditor on the French and Italian Wikipedia. The tool adds the information when you add some types of links. In the future you will be able to add this tool to your wiki. [8] [9] [10]
- All sites should now be faster if you have a recent browser. [11]
- You could see a serious bug when editing some templates with VisualEditor. It was fixed quickly. [12]
- VisualEditor could break when you edited an image. The issue was fixed quickly. [13]
Changes this week
- The new version of MediaWiki has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since March 25. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from March 31. It will be on all Wikipedias from April 1 (calendar).
- VisualEditor is now the main editing tool on 53 more Wikipedias. [14]
- You can now edit the mobile site of all wikis without an account. [15]
- You can test a new tool on the beta mobile site on the English Wikipedia. With the new tool, you can create lists of articles. [16]
- You can now see that VisualEditor is opening even if you're not looking at the top of the page. [17]
- VisualEditor doesn't leave empty titles with just nowiki tags any more. [18] [19] [20] [21]
Meetings
- You can join a meeting with the Wikidata team. The meeting will be on IRC on March 31 at 16:00 (UTC). [22]
- You can read the notes from the last meeting with the VisualEditor team.
- You can join the next weekly meeting with the Editing team. During the meetings you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on April 1 at 18:00 (UTC). See how to join.
Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
15:19, 30 March 2015 (UTC)
The Signpost, 1 April 2015
- In the media: Wiki-PR duo bulldoze a piñata store; Wifione arbitration case; French parliamentary plagiarism
- Featured content: Stop Press. Marie Celeste Mystery Solved. Crew Found Hiding In Wardrobe.
- Traffic report: All over the place
- Special report: Pictures of the Year 2015
Talk back
Message added 05:41, 1 April 2015 (UTC). You can remove this notice at any time by removing the {{Talkback}} or {{Tb}} template.
DYK for Alex Chinneck
On 1 April 2015, Did you know was updated with a fact from the article Alex Chinneck, which you recently created or substantially expanded. The fact was ... that the front of Alex Chinneck's house (pictured) seems to have slipped? The nomination discussion and review may be seen at Template:Did you know nominations/Alex Chinneck. You are welcome to check how many page hits the article got while on the front page (here's how, live views, daily totals), and it may be added to the statistics page if the total is over 5,000. Finally, if you know of an interesting fact from another recently created article, then please feel free to suggest it on the Did you know talk page. |
— Coffee // have a cup // beans // 08:01, 1 April 2015 (UTC)
The Signpost: 01 April 2015
- In the media: Wiki-PR duo bulldoze a piñata store; Wifione arbitration case; French parliamentary plagiarism
- Featured content: Stop Press. Marie Celeste Mystery Solved. Crew Found Hiding In Wardrobe.
- Traffic report: All over the place
- Special report: Pictures of the Year 2015
Disambiguation link notification for April 3
Hi. Thank you for your recent edits. Wikipedia appreciates your help. We noticed though that when you edited Gare Habib Bourguiba Monastir, you added a link pointing to the disambiguation page Monastir. Such links are almost always unintended, since a disambiguation page is merely a list of "Did you mean..." article titles. Read the FAQ • Join us at the DPL WikiProject.
It's OK to remove this message. Also, to stop receiving these messages, follow these opt-out instructions. Thanks, DPL bot (talk) 09:05, 3 April 2015 (UTC)
What Do You Do When You Know Someone Is Notable But...
Hello Andy. I am Jeffery from Malaysia with questions related to something that happened over the course of the last two weeks.
My questions is,
Italic textWhat does a contributor do when he knows someone is notable but lacks two respected byline biographical articles about the subject and while there are sources for propositions made in the entry, these are print entries (books available at the national and other libraries, archival material, etc.) without online links?Italic text
I am a Malaysian, born in the former Crown Colony of Penang, interested in getting People, Events, Places etc., during the British Malayan era, some presence/space here on Wikipedia and have been working at this since 2006. I now live in Petaling Jaya, Selangor, and have been retired a number of years now. And while my career has been spent in business consultancy, my retirement has allowed me to indulge my interest in local history.
Last month I drafted an entry for the recently deceased Prof. Dr. Satwant Singh Dhaliwal, former Dean of the Faculty of Science but my experience with editors who came to look at and review my piece, has left me wondering how I might ever make another contribution since we really do not have sources with online links for the sources we quote - sometimes finding even print references, like archival material etc. is difficult with so much destroyed by the Japanese during WWII, and in many cases there are no two respected byline articles on the subjects biography. I have asked questions and attempted to understand how to make the Dhaliwal entry work, but have come away, each time, feeling goal-posts have shifted between one conversation and another. It has been difficult to get direct answers to direct questions.
On one occasions I noticed an editor had removed a passage mentioning Dhaliwal receiving his Order of the Defender of the Realm KMN from Malaysia's Yang di-Pertuan Agong King. I asked why and was given to understand that an entry was no place for this. I brought up Albert Einstein's entry and was told that that was different because it was a Nobel Prize. I then gave several examples of other entries that had non-Nobel Prize awards shown, like Malaysia's first Prime Minister, Tunku Abdul Rahman - the editor proceeded to remove the awards/honours of all those. I then stayed up, overnight, compiling a long list that included Eisenhower, Michael Jackson, Sir Paul McCartney, Ronald Reagan etc., etc., some of whom were themselves Nobel Prize winners but all of whom also had non-Nobel Prize awards listed, and asked if those non-Nobel Prize awards would also be removed - if Prime Minister Tunku Abdul Rahman's were removed, why not also the others - but got no direct response to that.
I first came across info about Dhaliwal while doing my own research relating to a book I am working on about the disturbances in Perak 1861-1875, including the period of the murder of J. W. W. Birch. The two had nothing to do with each other, but in the course of my research online I came across the title of a website entry that sounded interested to me because it had to do with the University of Malaya - I have long been thinking about writing about the history of the University of Malaya which began with Raffles College that came about through donations from members of the public at that time. The Sikh who almost became Vice-Chancellor of UM! was an intriguing title and reading the article, I thought this was someone who might merit an entry here on Wikipedia.
I traced the author, Harmandar Singh, a columnist of The Star (Malaysia) for ten years and before that, writing under the same pen name, Sledgehammer, with the The Straits Times. Harmandar, as I soon found out, also published a trade magazine, Marketing (Malaysia), serving the Malaysian marketing fraternity. I asked the author for more info about Dhaliwal and was given a copy each of typewritten Curriculum Vitae and Biography, a copy of the obituary ad, and a photograph of the same Asia Samachar article, edited down and inserted in the print edition of The Star. I asked for more, but there was no more.
I then did some searches. It was difficult because apparently there are more (in instances, many more) than one Dhaliwal, SS Dhaliwal or Dhaliwal SS, and I had to cross-reference what I read in snippets with what was in Harmandar's article. and found there was very little that I could read in completeness but what little there was suggested this Dhaliwal was the same one in Harmandar's article, and he had been contributing a great deal, in many related areas (Zoology, Agriculture, Pest Control, Medicine - especially Cancer research,etc.) for a very long time, writing papers, providing translations of scientific terms from English to Malay (as he did with his book on Zoology etc., which terms found their way into school textbooks), presented at scientific conferences and was deemed suitable enough to represent Malaysia at several Pacific Science Congress meetings. These are examples of the searches I did, after which I needed to go through each item listed, one by one, and check to see (a) whether this was my Dhaliwal and (b) if it yielded any clues as to his notability or contribution.
- Google Book Search for "Satwant Singh Dhaliwal"
- Google Book Search for "SS Dhaliwal
- [https://www.google.com/search?num=100&newwindow=1&safe=off&rlz=1C1CHLW_enMY514MY514&biw=1366&bih=681&tbm=bks&q=%22Dhaliwal+SS%22&oq=%22Dhaliwal+SS%22&gs_l=serp.3...44621.46567.0.47868.11.11.0.0.0.0.77.609.11.11.0.msedr...0...1c.1.64.serp..7.4.236.622fBwGERno Google Book Search for "Dhaliwal SS"
- Google Scholar Search for "Satwant Singh Dhaliwal"
- Google Scholar Search for "SS Dhaliwal
- Google Scholar Search for "Dhaliwal SS
I was able to piece together a not comprehensive, but considerable list of the papers he authored or co-authored.
I was confident that Dhaliwal was someone who could have an entry and, as I was going over to Singapore for my father's 80th birthday, took the opportunity to spend some time at the National Library there to see what I could get from the newspapers. With information from Singapore's Straits Times, and some books, and filling in the gap with the CV, Bio and Harmandar's article - I did point out to Harmandar that his point about Codebreakers was incorrect and that Dhaliwal did not work on Codebreakers but that Dhaliwal's correspondence with Prof. H Gruneberg (or HG as Dhaliwal calls him in their correspondence) is preserved in the digital archives of Codebreakers - I began my short piece on Dhaliwal, hoping to improve on it over time.
Which brings me back to my question - I've given up on Dhaliwal which was not a nice experience for me, over which I got worked up etc. - which has bearing on whether I continue to contribute to Wikipedia in future.
In many cases information is scant, but I try my best to find it and do not write any claim or proposition that cannot be substantiated via print resources - published books, national daily newspapers and archival materials - which in almost all cases have no online links to digitized copies (I remember more than 5 yrs ago the guys at the national archives, Arkib Negara Malaysia, said they were going to digitize, but here we are today and still all you can do is some basic searches through their online catalogue.
I am sorry if this has taken up too much of your time, and thank you in advance if you have chosen to go through this.
jefferyseow (talk) 01:12, 5 April 2015 (UTC)
- @Jefferyseow: If you have an unresolvable disagreement with another editor, please follow the steps at WP:DR. For more general help, please use WP:Teahouse. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 06:46, 5 April 2015 (UTC)
Wikidata weekly summary #152
- Discussions
- Closed RfC: Reforming administrator inactivity criteria
- Events/Blogs/Press
- WikiArabia takes place in Monastir, Tunisia, 3-5 April
- The GLAM-WIKI 2015 conference in The Hague (10-12 April) features several presentations and tutorials about Wikidata for/with cultural institutions.
- The Library world will use Wikidata to link its information to any and all Wikipedias. No longer English only, but every Wikipedia will be exposed in this way.
- Freebase, SEO and Wikidata
- Office hour on IRC covering overall status/development, Freebase and admin inactivity criteria RfC. You can read the log.
- Other Noteworthy Stuff
- Magnus wrote a short tour of Wikidata's tool ecosystem.
- A first version of the Primary Sources Tool has been released. It'll help with migrating Freebase data and more.
- Italian Wikipedia's quality festival is focusing on interwiki links and Wikidata this month. Help them out?
- Lots of new databases have been added to Mix n Match.
- Screenshots of the current state of new constraint reports and checks against 3rd party databases have been posted.
- Did you know?
- Newest properties: choreographer, senat.fr ID, Great Aragonese Encyclopedia ID
- Development
- Wikidata development started 3 years ago. <3 to everyone who is a part of it.
- Went through all the feedback we got for improving watchlist integration on Wikipedia and co and posted our assesment
- Put the infrastructure for creating Turtle-Beta dumps in place. All new Wikidata dumps will be in https://dumps.wikimedia.org/wikidatawiki/entities/ from Monday on (the old * directory will be kept around and receive new json dumps for backwards compatibility).
- Reduced size of entities pages by removing no longer needed data (to make the UI faster).
- Fixed bug that sometimes caused dates and other types of values to be cut short when quickly saving. (phabricator:T92831)
- Fixed issues with setting focus after clicking edit.
- Monthly Tasks
- Hack on one of these.
- Help fix these items which have been flagged using Wikidata - The Game.
- Help develop the next summary here!
- Contribute to a Showcase item
- Help translate or proofread pages in your own language!
Cite tweet discussion
Hi Andy. Please note that various changes to {{Cite tweet}}, which you created, are being discussed at Help talk:Citation Style 1 § Adding retweet parameter to cite tweet and twitter status (see also the changes I've made in the sandbox, and the new testcases page) - Evad37 [talk] 04:57, 6 April 2015 (UTC)
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
- You can join a new email list for important news about Wikimedia Labs. [23]
- You can read the last monthly report. In the future you can read team reports every three months. You can see current work on the roadmap. [24] [25]
- The number of articles in Special:Statistics is now updated once a month. [26]
- You can use a new version of the Wikipedia app for Android. Using the app, you can now share a fact with your friends. [27]
Problems
- The import tool was broken for a few days. Imports didn't add log entries. You can delete and import pages again if necessary. [28]
- Labs was broken several times this week. [29] [30] [31] [32]
Changes this week
- The new version of MediaWiki has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since April 1. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from April 7. It will be on all Wikipedias from April 8 (calendar).
- You can now add the same special characters with VisualEditor as with the wikitext editor. [33]
- Many bugs around copy-paste in VisualEditor are now fixed. [34] [35]
- You can now use basic tools of VisualEditor in the new talk tool. You can add links, bold and italics. You can also mention people. [36]
Meetings
- You can join the next weekly meeting with the Editing team. During the meetings you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on April 8 at 18:00 (UTC). See how to join.
Future changes
Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
15:42, 6 April 2015 (UTC)
This Month in GLAM: March 2015
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The Signpost: 08 April 2015
- Traffic report: Resurrection week
- Featured content: Partisan arrangements, dodgy dollars, a mysterious union of strings, and a hole that became a monument
- WikiProject report: WikiProject Christianity
- Arbitration report: New Functionary appointments
- Technology report: Bugs, Repairs, and Internal Operational News
Disambiguation link notification for April 10
Hi. Thank you for your recent edits. Wikipedia appreciates your help. We noticed though that when you edited Mahdia, you added a link pointing to the disambiguation page Monastir. Such links are almost always unintended, since a disambiguation page is merely a list of "Did you mean..." article titles. Read the FAQ • Join us at the DPL WikiProject.
It's OK to remove this message. Also, to stop receiving these messages, follow these opt-out instructions. Thanks, DPL bot (talk) 09:06, 10 April 2015 (UTC)
A new reference tool
Hello Books & Bytes subscribers. There is a new Visual Editor reference feature in development called Citoid. It is designed to "auto-fill" references using a URL or DOI. We would really appreciate you testing whether TWL partners' references work in Citoid. Sharing your results will help the developers fix bugs and improve the system. If you have a few minutes, please visit the testing page for simple instructions on how to try this new tool. Regards, MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 18:48, 10 April 2015 (UTC)
Wikidata weekly summary #153
- Events/Blogs/Press
- Other Noteworthy Stuff
- Build a RSS image feed based on a query
- Periodic table based on Wikidata data by Ricordisamoa
- ~8000 biographical items with dates in the description, but no birth/death date statements
- Magnus says ~8% (~1.4M) of all Wikidata items do not have any site links to Wikipedia etc.; knowledge that exists exclusively on Wikidata
- Bene* wrote a user script that adds a filter bar above the statement section and lets you filter it
- Magnus wrote a quick user script to move identifiers into the right sidebar to show how a statement section without identifiers would look like. This came up as part of a longer discussion on the mailinglist about moving identifier statements into their own section. Progress is being tracked at phabricator:T95287.
- Samsung releases Freebase-Wikidata mappings in CC0: 4.4M pairs generated from Wikipedia links and custom code
- Thanks to Bene* hovercards now also work for items and properties
- New tool by Magnus for Wikidata item labels
- Did you know?
- Newest properties: short name, list of episodes, named as
- New task forces: Star Wars, Open Access
- Development
- We are going to change the way value suggestions are ranked when entering a new statement. This will help with "male" and "female" not showing up among the top suggestions. Previously we ranked by number of sitelinks. We will change this to the maximum of sitelinks and labels. So if an item has labels in many languages but no sitelinks like "male" and "female" it will still show up high in the suggestions. (phabricator:T94404)
- Discussed how to move forward with identifiers. Outcome: They should get their own datatype. (phabricator:T95287)
- Implemented arbitrary access for the {{#property:…}} parser function. This can be invoked on the wikis that have arbitrary access enabled by using {{#property:P123|from=Q42}}. So far this is only Wikidata itself.
- Did further performance work on the client (Wikipedia and co) in preparation for arbitrary access
- Improved the performance of wbgetentities significantly when loading a large number of entities
- Wrote more browser tests for different datavalues
- Further work on RDF mapping and dumps
- Fixed in other language box showing old data (phabricator:T90893)
- Fixed language fallback on Special:Recent changes and Special:Contributions
- Added language fallback for the tooltip on badge icons
- Monthly Tasks
- Hack on one of these.
- Help fix these items which have been flagged using Wikidata - The Game.
- Help develop the next summary here!
- Contribute to a Showcase item
- Help translate or proofread pages in your own language!
Nomination for deletion of Template:Cite tweet
Template:Cite tweet has been nominated for deletion. You are invited to comment on the discussion at the template's entry on the Templates for discussion page. kelapstick(bainuu) 23:52, 11 April 2015 (UTC)
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
- You can read the latest news about VisualEditor.
- You can now use the new translation tool on 22 Wikipedias. You now see the tool the first time you create a new page. [38]
- The list of bad user names on your wiki no longer works. The global list replaces it. You can ask to add rules for bad user names on Meta. [39] [40]
Problems
Changes this week
- The new version of MediaWiki has been on test wikis and MediaWiki.org since April 8. It will be on non-Wikipedia wikis from April 14. It will be on all Wikipedias from April 15 (calendar).
- Developers will start to rename 1.5 million accounts on Wednesday. After that all accounts will be unique and will work on all wikis. [43] [44]
- All users can now test link previews ("Hovercards") on several Wikipedias. [45]
Meetings
- You can join the next weekly meeting with the Editing team. During the meetings you can tell developers which bugs are the most important. The meeting will be on April 15 at 18:00 (UTC). See how to join.
Tech news prepared by tech ambassadors and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
16:41, 13 April 2015 (UTC)
I'm wondering why you moved Template:Infobox NYCS to Template:Infobox New York City Subway station. For the sake of brevity, I think it should be moved back.
Also, this infobox applies to Staten Island Railway stations as well, so Template:Infobox NYC rapid transit station may also be an appropriate title. Epic Genius (talk) 02:19, 15 April 2015 (UTC)
- It's standard to expand acronyms in template names, for clarity. The short form is still available for use, as a redirect. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 08:21, 15 April 2015 (UTC)
Authority control
Greetings to the mothership at Burlington House. Template:Authority control needs to be ported properly to Meta. Then I will mark my entry at the global user page there. – Kaihsu (talk) 19:31, 16 April 2015 (UTC)
- @Kaihsu: I have repeated my earlier request for such an import. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 19:40, 16 April 2015 (UTC)
The Signpost: 15 April 2015
- Traffic report: Furious domination
Draft ANI
User:Tutelary/DraftANI Given that you commented on the initial discussion, would you mind telling me if I mischaracterized some things, went on some sort of tangent, or that some things I mentioned are unsupported? I've been to ANI before and generally, it can get hectic so it's essential to have all the ducks in a row. Tutelary (talk) 17:51, 18 April 2015 (UTC)
- @Tutelary: Looks, OK, except that "you really, really need to take a break and calm down" was the comment for the talk page block; the initial block was "User seems to have gone off the deep end again, see edits at talk page and AN". Protecting the talk page entirely seems unwarranted. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 18:07, 18 April 2015 (UTC)