Wikidata:Project chat/Archive/2017/02

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Biology: Categories for species

Hello,
You are aware of the problem in wikicommons about species and wikidata: wikicommons has species categories and species galleries. But wikipedias have no species categories. So currently there is only one wikidata item per species. Conclusion: most wikicommons species category have no wikidata item!
Someone told me that we needed to create category item for all species.
Is that true ? I seems a lot of work.
I was waiting/hoping for another technical solution.
Best regards Liné1 (talk) 22:00, 31 January 2017 (UTC)

Hello Liné1, Last august a Request for Comments was started, which was not conclusive. Higher on this page "Links from items to Commons categories and galleries" shows that adding of commons categories to wikidata items on articles is a growing phenomenon. Lymantria (talk) 06:54, 1 February 2017 (UTC)

Be inspired and let us collaborate

The WMF is seeking people who are inspired to reach out to outside knowledge networks. I have asked and it would allow us to reach out to other "hobby networks" and seek how our data and their data can mutually improve.

There is a lot of potential here; there are many projects all with their own niche. When we collaborate, we can share identifiers and compare data. We can both include data as we see fit but more importantly we can curate the data when the data does not match. For those who say "their data is not good enough" I put it to you that neither is ours. The notion is that we both may benefit.

Let us be inspired to do good and improve our data both in quality and in quantity. Thanks, GerardM (talk) 06:55, 1 February 2017 (UTC)

"Rogue" Twitter accounts of national services

Recently, a number of US national agencies have spawned off so-called "rogue" or "alternative" Twitter accounts. Could Wikidata be a good place to collect these? Obviously with a qualifier. Thoughts? --Denny (talk) 01:41, 30 January 2017 (UTC)

what accounts? MechQuester (talk) 01:50, 30 January 2017 (UTC)
Twitter accounts. --Tagishsimon (talk) 02:00, 30 January 2017 (UTC)
Sorry, clarified. --Denny (talk) 05:22, 30 January 2017 (UTC)
With all due respect to US politics, there are 2 reasons not to add fake/rogue/alternative accounts to any official agency's item. 1. We don't know who created the fake. It may be a single employee, it might be the whole director's office but it could also be an outsider. We will probably never know. 2. In a few months, when the dust settles and the new administration will find a status quo with the current staff the accounts will slowly disappear, so no point adding them here. DGtal (talk) 06:40, 30 January 2017 (UTC)
+1 Don't mix knowledge and information. Snipre (talk) 07:57, 30 January 2017 (UTC)
A good idea is to go to their official website and then look around to find their "official" sponsored account. MechQuester (talk) 14:26, 30 January 2017 (UTC)

Unfortunate outcome, but understandable. --Denny (talk) 17:22, 1 February 2017 (UTC)

Wikimania 2017

Hello all,

The international Wikimedia conference will settle in Montreal (Q340) on August 11-13. As the call for submission is about to start, let's talk about what you would like to see happening about Wikidata.

Do you have a project of submissing a talk, workshop, meetup? Which topics would you like to talk about with the development team? Let's talk about our ideas on Wikidata:Wikimania 2017!

Thanks, Lea Lacroix (WMDE) (talk) 09:41, 1 February 2017 (UTC)

Trouble understanding how to merge articles?

I would like to request a merge. When I go to help:merge, it gives me 2 choices: special:mergeitems or the gadget.

When I go to special:mergeitems, I get a “Permission denied” error. When I click the link to my preferences, I do not see a “gadgets” section.

Since I apparently do not have the privilege to merge items, where can I request an administrator to perform the merge? Bwrs (talk) 17:30, 1 February 2017 (UTC)

Could you please provide some steps to reproduce your problem. I guess you are on the mobile site.
There's no particular place to request a merge since everybody can do it. Matěj Suchánek (talk) 17:56, 1 February 2017 (UTC)

About data donations: CC0 (Public Domain)

Hi everyone,

I am working in a future project in which we are going to gather data and use it, with the focus of migrate then its content to Wikimedia projects. In the case of Wikipedia I understand that every piece of content migrated entirely must to be licensed as CC SA-BY 3.0 or broader. But I want to be safe when I will write the guidelines to contribute and the set the license for the project so I was thinking to apply CC SA-BY to all the project but, if I want to make migrations of data that we are going to gather, do we need to set the CC0 (Public Domain) license for the data?

Maybe it is a nonsense, but I want to be sure with that process before to make any migrations in the future.

Thanks in advance!

Regards, Ivanhercaz (Talk) 11:56, 26 January 2017 (UTC)

 Comment Checking Wikidata's website footer I imagine that I could set something similar to it, I mean: "data licensed with CC0 (Public Domain), the rest of the content licensed with CC SA-BY". Correct? Regards, Ivanhercaz (Talk) 12:04, 26 January 2017 (UTC)
That sounds right. --Jarekt (talk) 14:04, 26 January 2017 (UTC)
Thank you Jarekt! Regards, Ivanhercaz (Talk) 15:41, 26 January 2017 (UTC)
Data is under a different copyright law as intellectual work. On data itself is no copyright, but on a collection you can have copyrights. Take statistics of sports people, for example the WTA site for female tennis players. The data we can use, but we can not copy the whole set. In every day life this means we can manually type the info into WikiData, but we can not use a script to scrape their website without their allowance. In case of doubt you can always contact legal@wikimedia.org for details. Edoderoo (talk) 19:57, 26 January 2017 (UTC)
@Edoderoo: You say that as though laws are the same everywhere and they are not. WMF servers are in the United States and Americans don't recognize any rights to databases. We license the data here in the most liberal way only because of other legal systems that have more restrictive laws. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 03:47, 30 January 2017 (UTC)
Weird, as two years ago their was contact with legal of WMF about data of tennisplayers on the WTF/ITF websites, and their message then was to not scrape every database we could find, as far as I remember. Did legal tell you that we can use any database we see, or is it your own conclusion of how legal stuff works? Edoderoo (talk) 07:46, 30 January 2017 (UTC)
@Edoderoo: My own understanding. I can imagine several reasons why legal would suggest against trying to scrape every database you can find but the results of tennis matches are not copyrightable. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 09:48, 2 February 2017 (UTC)

Links from items to Commons categories and galleries

Here's an update of results of queries into linking patterns from Wikidata to Commons categories and galleries.

A previous version was posted here at VP and also at at Commons VP in December 2015.

There are also some further historical versions, going back to September 2014, for older comparisons.

Commons categories
(5,499,772) 		Commons galleries
(113,395) 		total linked
Wikidata articles
(~ 22,165,947) 		~ 1,268,063 100,042 ~ 1,299,996
sitelinks:
437,882 		P373:
~ 1,209,119 		sitelinks:
96,839 		P935:
92,865 		sitelinks:
534,727 		props:
~ 1,235,579
Wikidata categories
(2,870,035) 		396,087 558 396,094
sitelinks:
387,768 		P373:
355,205 		sitelinks:
16 		P935:
545 		sitelinks:
387,786 		props:
355,209
total linked 1,426,002 100,086 ~ 1,696,090 items / 1,523,993 pages
sitelinks:
825,656 		P373:
1,326,176 		sitelinks:
96,853 		P935:
92,898 		sitelinks:
922,499 		props: ~ 1,590,788 items /
1,419,074 pages

Compared to 2015, perhaps the most notable feature is that new sitelinks to Commons continue to be dominated by sitelinks between Commons categories and article-like items here: up 183,682 compared to an increase of 47,384 in sitelinks between Commons categories and category-like items. (The total number of Commons categories has increased by 912,375 over the same period).

This is against how some Wikidatans feel sitelinks to Commons ought to work. However, it does seem to be the clear preference of most users when adding sitelinks, so perhaps the time has come to accept it as mostly harmless. Jheald (talk) 23:29, 26 January 2017 (UTC)

Thanks Jheald. Curated galleries at Commons are PITA compared with categorisation, they will often never need to exist for many minor players, whereas a category is easy, and can work in multiple ways. I would prefer to see Commons look at whether curated galleries should be subsidiary (or discouraged) in the system and that makes it even easier to win an argument among WDatans. From the perspective of a WSian linking to a category at Commons is more beneficial than linking to a gallery, well it works that way for authors as many do not write many books. The problem is that here we map primarily map categories to categories as a preference, and there is no easy way to have a CommonsCat link to articles, yet many of the sisterwikis may not have categories to match. We need some better way to work through the interweaving of interwikis based upon how the sister prioritises their pages, not how we think that they should.  — billinghurst sDrewth
@Jheald: are you sure users did this and not just one user with a bot? Multichill (talk) 08:48, 27 January 2017 (UTC)
@Multichill: It's possible. I have no idea who has been adding the sitelinks -- I'm not even sure I'd know how to query the history to investigate at scale. If somebody were to have been adding sitelinks with a bot, I'm not clear where they'd be getting their information from. If someone were converting P373s into article --> commonscat sitelinks, why stop at only 180,000 of them? But maybe there are bots out there that add commonscat sitelinks. Jheald (talk) 09:19, 27 January 2017 (UTC)
I often see users creating items by linking a Commons category to a Wikipedia article. The number doesn't surprise me: The most obvious way to add interwiki links is to click the "Add links" link in the sidebar. - Nikki (talk) 12:58, 27 January 2017 (UTC)
Hello guys, maybe I can try to explain you the wikicommons contributor mindset:
  • wikicommons has much much more categories than galleries. So some contributors work only on categories.
  • until very recently, you could access from wikicommons only ONE wikidata item. So if your wikicommons category was linked to a wikidata category item, you could retrieve no properties.
  • now we can access any wikidata item from wikicommons, but it is still quite complex to access wikidata, test if it is a category item, use category's main topic (P301) to access the other item. Not many template do it.
  • for biology, wikicommons has species categories (categories are mandatory) and species galleries (galleries in 20% of cases). But wikipedias have no species categories. So currently there is only one wikidata item per species. Conclusion: most wikicommons species category have no wikidata category item!
    • Case1: When a commons species category has no commons gallery => we link 'commons species category' to 'wikidata taxon item'
    • Case2: When a commons species category has a commons gallery => 'commons species category' has no wikidata item
Best regards Liné1 (talk) 07:21, 2 February 2017 (UTC)

Sanitize labels before using them in wikitext

Hi all. I saw a number of Wikidata modules at Wikipedias, and many use labels from Wikidata items directly in generated wikitext. That is not good because labels may contain any characters, so a Wikidata label may be constructed to e.g. generate arbitrary wikilinks or external links. I suggest all writers of Wikidata modules to sanitize fetched labels with mw.text.nowiki before using them in wikitext. Best regard, Dipsacus fullonum (talk) 11:45, 2 February 2017 (UTC)

NB. I forgot to mention, but you should of course also sanitize values of type string and monolingual text. Best regards, Dipsacus fullonum (talk) 12:00, 2 February 2017 (UTC)

Opened BY?

Hello! I am working on a church at the moment. The church was opened at a certain date (Property:P1619 by a "certain person"). How can I make this person, Q5803235, to be the person that officially opened this location?

Maybe officially opened by (P542). - Kareyac (talk) 05:46, 3 February 2017 (UTC)
I think this is perfect, thank you! --Fringilla (talk) 05:59, 3 February 2017 (UTC)
This section was archived on a request by: Matěj Suchánek (talk) 14:02, 8 February 2017 (UTC)

Union

Please make union of Q16205862 (was a redirect in enwiki) and Q427070. I searched help to find a procedure to do or request this, but I couldnt finde. Please link it more clearly somewhere thank you. --Sailko (talk) 10:08, 3 February 2017 (UTC)

@Sailko: Help:Merge is what you’re looking for. I’m not going to merge these items, feel free to practice it by yourself. You can’t break anything which cannot be reverted. Regards, MisterSynergy (talk) 10:10, 3 February 2017 (UTC)
Thanks! I made a redirect from Help:Union to Help:Merge, somebody could look for this like I did. --Sailko (talk) 10:17, 3 February 2017 (UTC)
The merge looks good. I tidied a bit as you can see in the merged item’s history, but that’s basically everything you need to know. Regards, MisterSynergy (talk) 10:22, 3 February 2017 (UTC)
This section was archived on a request by: Matěj Suchánek (talk) 14:02, 8 February 2017 (UTC)

Edit summary statistics?

Hi all, I'm interested in getting some stats based on edit summary added by tools. For example brilliant QuickStatments always adds #quickstatements hashtag. I'm wondering if it's possible to get how many edits was done by me using this tool and get top 10 tool users. Any ideas? Yarl (talk) 22:55, 3 February 2017 (UTC)

@Yarl: Quarry? See for example Wikidata Most common deletion summaries and edits of a user with a specific edit summary and Who did the most reverts in fawiki. --Atlasowa (talk) 21:40, 4 February 2017 (UTC)
@Atlasowa: Thanks! Yarl (talk) 16:15, 5 February 2017 (UTC)
This section was archived on a request by: Matěj Suchánek (talk) 14:02, 8 February 2017 (UTC)

Combine

fr:Concerto pour piano de Poulenc and es:Concierto para piano (Poulenc) mean the same piece. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 08:16, 6 February 2017 (UTC)

Thanks for report, → ← Merged. - Kareyac (talk) 08:43, 6 February 2017 (UTC)
This section was archived on a request by: Matěj Suchánek (talk) 14:02, 8 February 2017 (UTC)

Hebrew Wikipedia issue

Can a Hebrew-speaking editor please check Ze'ev Jabotinsky (Q319896) and Yoanna Jabotinsky (Q6822632), which seem to be about the same person, or two related people? Each links to a different he.Wikipedia article. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 11:11, 7 February 2017 (UTC)

Yoanna Jabotinsky (Q6822632) was the wife of Ze'ev Jabotinsky (Q319896). DGtal (talk) 11:20, 7 February 2017 (UTC)
I agree. I've linked them with spouse (P26) and edited the English label of Yoanna Jabotinsky (Q6822632) as suggested. Deryck Chan (talk) 11:48, 7 February 2017 (UTC)

┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘

Thank you, both. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 13:13, 7 February 2017 (UTC)

This section was archived on a request by: Matěj Suchánek (talk) 14:02, 8 February 2017 (UTC)

Welcome

Can someone give me a talk welcome? I'd like to have the helpful links included in the welcome, but I would feel pretty goofy welcoming myself. ;-) Daphne Lantier (talk) 22:46, 7 February 2017 (UTC)

My pleasure. You're very welcome! Jheald (talk) 00:00, 8 February 2017 (UTC)
This section was archived on a request by: Matěj Suchánek (talk) 14:02, 8 February 2017 (UTC)

Adding label in any arbitary language.

According to https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/11/06/any-language-allowed-in-wikidata/ , any language should be admissible for use on Wikidata. However, when i tried to add a manchu label (ISO code mnc) to an arbitary item via the "list of headers" button, it say it cannot recognize the language parameter. How to overcome the error? C933103 (talk) 01:42, 3 February 2017 (UTC)

@C933103: As per this answer, you have to complete the most important messages in order to add that support. --Liuxinyu970226 (talk) 07:59, 4 February 2017 (UTC)

regex formatter for external-ID

Thanks, MisterSynergy (talk) 11:22, 3 February 2017 (UTC)

Okay thanks, let’s see what happens tomorrow. I thought the wrapping <nowiki>-tags would be enough to delimit the expression. —MisterSynergy (talk) 12:37, 3 February 2017 (UTC)
<nowiki> does not delimit format expressions. It's only function is to escape wiki markup. --Pasleim (talk) 10:49, 4 February 2017 (UTC)

Tools to add statements?

Hi! I'm using PetScan (Q23665536) to search for specific items on Wikipedia that have no statements. When I have a good selection of items, how can I add the instance of statement to those in one batch? //Mippzon (talk) 18:13, 3 February 2017 (UTC)

"Other sources" → "Use wiki" → "Wikidata". Log in to WiDaR and you will see AutoList-like menu. Matěj Suchánek (talk) 19:11, 3 February 2017 (UTC)

Q18542787

I am 99.9999% sure that there is no reason to have an item such as Q18542787, but sometimes seemingly strange things are done so on purpose. Since ~10 different editors touched that item, including sysops, I’d ask for a reason to keep it, otherwise I’d request it’s deletion (tomorrow). —MisterSynergy (talk) 23:22, 3 February 2017 (UTC)

manager of VfL Wolfsburg (Q20089909) is another similar problem. —MisterSynergy (talk) 23:31, 3 February 2017 (UTC)
No. The latter is perfectly OK. Thierry Caro (talk) 04:12, 4 February 2017 (UTC)
I do not see any other item of that type and think that there are better ways to model coaching positions. Not sure which one to prefer:
Both do not require items such as manager of VfL Wolfsburg (Q20089909). —MisterSynergy (talk) 06:43, 4 February 2017 (UTC)
My understanding of position held (P39) is that it is specifically for public office, i.e. political-type positions, so perhaps:
--Oravrattas (talk) 09:16, 4 February 2017 (UTC)
I’m okay with that approach as well. —MisterSynergy (talk) 09:28, 4 February 2017 (UTC)
The notability of Q18542787 was already discuessed in Wikidata:Project chat/Archive/2014/12#Intersection properties. There was pretty clear consensus against this item and the only user defending the item was a sock puppet. --Pasleim (talk) 10:52, 4 February 2017 (UTC)
Thanks, then it is a clear situation. I’ll fix the affected items and propose Q18542787 for deletion. The other problem can be solved independently. —MisterSynergy (talk) 11:00, 4 February 2017 (UTC)

Websites

Hello. Is there an item to show that an item is a sports website or a news portal website? Xaris333 (talk) 12:43, 5 February 2017 (UTC)

Easy way to clean up wrong descriptions

Look at this item. It is not a Wikimedia category but has such descriptions in many languages. There are many items like this. Mostly because of bots or autoEdit. See more examples here. Is there any tool like autoEdit that can delete such descriptions with one click as autoEdit adds :)?--ԱշոտՏՆՂ (talk) 13:13, 5 February 2017 (UTC)

Easy with MediaWiki:Gadget-dataDrainer.js, just not sure if it only works for admins or is it fixed. Stryn (talk) 13:28, 5 February 2017 (UTC)
No, still admins-only. And that 'autopatrolled' group. --Edgars2007 (talk) 13:30, 5 February 2017 (UTC)
Normally in this case you must check the history and you can find a wrong merge. I have restored the previous situation using "Undo" --ValterVB (talk) 13:42, 5 February 2017 (UTC)
Why a misleading edit summary and unnecessary ping? Stryn (talk) 13:56, 5 February 2017 (UTC)
It's an automatic edit summary, so I don't know why system has created that summary, I reverted edits from 15:37, 19 jan 2017‎, about the ping I don't understand. --ValterVB (talk) 14:16, 5 February 2017 (UTC)
See Incorrect revert summaries/pings --Succu (talk) 14:30, 5 February 2017 (UTC)

Wikidata links to English Wikipedia draftspace

There is a discussion relevant to the above topic, here. All comments welcome. --Euryalus (talk) 11:31, 28 January 2017 (UTC)

you know, that link they are referring to in the post, you can thank @MSGJ: for that. MechQuester (talk) 14:31, 28 January 2017 (UTC)

The message there is: 

The EnWiki community requests that Wikidata establish a policy against linking to our draft space. Drafts are intended as an internal workspace. Drafts may contain inappropriate or problematical content. External consumption of drafts is undesired, and is strongly discouraged.

So far the straw poll is a unanimous 4 out of 4 update 8 out of 8 and I closed the poll-21:18, 29 January 2017 (UTC), endorsing it pretty strongly. If the Wikidata community is agreeable, I'd like to follow up investigating the possibility of some sort of technical barrier to entering draft space links. Alsee (talk) 19:22, 28 January 2017 (UTC)

According to WD:N Draft namespace already isn't accepted as a valid sitelink. Mbch331 (talk) 19:32, 28 January 2017 (UTC)
Mbch331, perhaps I am reading it differently because there was in fact a Draft space link, and an open Phabricator task requesting an upgrade to the functionality of draft links, but I can easily see reading it as not targeting draft links at all. That's the Notability policy for Wikidata items. In order to qualify as Notable, the item needs to satisfy one of the listed criteria. The data item did satisfy the criteria, it had links to Italian and French articles. So Notability was satisfied. The item was valid. Then someone thought it helpful to add the a draft link exactly matching the topic. That cannot diminish the already established Notability. Maybe my reading is biased by the circumstances, but it couldn't hurt to more directly target the issue. Alsee (talk) 20:35, 28 January 2017 (UTC)
Can we scan for any other Draft links that might exist? Alsee (talk) 20:48, 28 January 2017 (UTC)
The issue isn't about whether the item is notable. Enwiki doesn't want that external links point to it's draft namespace.
Policy-wise I see no reason why we should against the wishes of Enwiki on this point. Such links should be removed. It might also make sense to prevent the addition of those links technically. ChristianKl (talk) 21:30, 28 January 2017 (UTC)
Yes, we should do it at the mediawiki level. Draft on en.wp is not very much different from the user subspace, and we do not link to those.--Ymblanter (talk) 22:36, 28 January 2017 (UTC)
  •  Comment Definitely agree that a sister wiki should be able to define which namespaces are outward facing for notability. Draft: namespace pages at English Wikipedia are not articles, and should not be linked here.  — billinghurst sDrewth 10:25, 29 January 2017 (UTC)
This has nothing to do with notability. Even for clearly notable Wikidata items (for example one's that have sitelinks to the French and German Wikipedia) enwiki doesn't want us to link to their draft namespace. ChristianKl (talk) 19:21, 1 February 2017 (UTC)
  •  Comment why technical barrier? why not flag? why policy? why don't english wikipedia editors edit here, rather than straw polls there? you realize people will link to draftspace elsewhere to manage the list, i.e. english does not control inbound linking. - just because english wants to get spun up over a year old ticket with no action, does not mean wikidata needs to take any action. Slowking4 (talk) 13:07, 29 January 2017 (UTC)
    Slowking4, "english does not control inbound linking" - Correct. It's a polite request from one of our communities to another of our communities. "does not mean wikidata needs to take any action" - Correct. It's a request. "why technical barrier" Because EnWiki considers these links to be undesirable, and I believe/hope the Wikidata community considers these links to be undesirable, and on EnWiki we sometimes use edit filters to prevent some categories of undesirable links or other content. If anything, it seems even more in line with Wikidata philosophy and design to place constraints on entered content. (Good luck trying to enter date information for a Solargraph, Wikidata just locks up the save button with no visible way to proceed.) Alsee (talk) 21:00, 29 January 2017 (UTC)
why are you linking to a commons image with screwed up metadata? there is no wikidata there. i would suggest you need to produce some evidence if you want your concerns taken seriously. Slowking4 (talk) 13:50, 31 January 2017 (UTC)
I was linking to a random solargraph to illustrate what I meant. The date of that particular image is January 1 - December 31, 2014. Normal Wikis handle that just fine. There has been discussion of switching Commons meta data to use Wikidata. Wikidata doesn't allow date information to be entered for Solargraphs or any other any date-range content. It just locks up the data field, with no apparent way to proceed. Alsee (talk) 17:26, 31 January 2017 (UTC)
you could proceed without a date. you could enter a year. Slowking4 (talk) 03:54, 1 February 2017 (UTC)
  • This is an issue on how "article" is defined. Articles should link only to articles. English Wikipedia's Draft: namespace isn't articles, so articles shouldn't be linked to there. Od Mishehu (talk) 06:42, 30 January 2017 (UTC)
I think this is a good opportunity to combine the wishes: enwiki doesn't want draft: pages to be linked and wikidata doesn't want to host the links - at least doesn't consider them notable. I support ChristianKl in his idea for technically prevention. Still, if a page is moved from mainspace to draft: on enwiki, what will happen? Lymantria (talk) 06:47, 30 January 2017 (UTC)
We don't have a policy of only linking to articles. We also have items for templates. Do you think there's a reason why enwiki templates shouldn't be linked on Wikidata and thus have links to the versions of the template in other languages? ChristianKl (talk) 19:26, 1 February 2017 (UTC)
Templates on enwiki are the equivalent of their counterparts on other wikis; dratfs on enwiki are not the equivelant of atricles. Od Mishehu (talk) 21:52, 5 February 2017 (UTC)

Semiprotecting properties by default

Hi everyone,

I wonder if we should semiprotect the entire Property namespace, as properties aren't so easy to improve and too easy to vandalise (with an enormous and unpredictable impact). Becoming an autoconfirmed user (or receiving the confirmed flag) is really easy, and unregistered users will always be able to edit the Property_talk namespace or send requests to other users to add, for example, new labels or aliases, so I think that this protection shouldn't prevent anyone from contributing to Wikidata in any way.

What do you think? --abián 18:27, 28 January 2017 (UTC)

  •  Support ChristianKl (talk) 21:30, 28 January 2017 (UTC)
  •  Support, indeed, I do not currently see any drawback in protecting all the properties.--Ymblanter (talk) 22:32, 28 January 2017 (UTC)
  •  Support Good idea. --Jklamo (talk) 23:05, 28 January 2017 (UTC)
  •  Oppose Semi-protect may be a good idea for wildly used property like instance of (P31), but I don't beleive it's a problem in the first place. I have like 20 to 30 properties pages in follow list my and I never see one of this pages vandalised. --Fralambert (talk) 23:28, 28 January 2017 (UTC)
  •  Oppose per Fralambert. This would also discourage, if not prevent, new users/ IPs from adding much-needed labels in smaller languages. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 23:39, 28 January 2017 (UTC)
    •  Comment, edit conflict: A look shows us that (almost?) all the recent edits made by unregistered users are tests or vandalisms. Unfortunately, I don't think that this proportion of valid/total edits is going to improve in any moment of the future. However, the editing frecuency, in general, will do continue increasing (and, with it, the number of vandalisms on properties) as Wikidata becomes more and more reachable from the Wikipedias. Instead of only showing a padlock, we could include a message informing that, if the user wants to contribute to the property without having a registered account (something that I see as extremely unusual), we encourage them to leave a request (link to an appropriate new pre-filled message on the talk page, or on the project chat, or on a specific page for these cases). --abián 00:28, 29 January 2017 (UTC)
  •  Comment While I see the potential for vandalism here, the property namespace is hardly edited by non-patrollers anyway (about 5 to 10 edits per day), and as far as I see, non-constructive edits are reverted faster there than elsewhere. --YMS (talk) 00:08, 29 January 2017 (UTC)
  •  Oppose we need labels in all languages.. Once we have them for all 280+ languages maybe.. Thanks, GerardM (talk) 00:17, 29 January 2017 (UTC)
We do need labels for all languages however we need good labels for all languages. Labels for small languages are much harder to patrol. Having people who actually understand how Wikidata works write those labels makes some sense. ChristianKl (talk) 06:09, 29 January 2017 (UTC)
  •  Support We don't have the resources to watch all properties in all languages. As it is hard to know if a label in a given language is vandalism or not without knowing the language, and we don't have people in all our languages monitoring the changes, then it is a good idea to semiprotect the labels. --Micru (talk) 08:52, 29 January 2017 (UTC)
  •  Oppose Until someone can offer an actual demonstrated benefit to this change. This is a proposal, but absolutely no evidence as to why this is being proposed as a good change. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 09:59, 29 January 2017 (UTC)
  •  Neutral with tendency to oppose. I don’t see what could be meant by “vandalise with an enormous and unpredictable impact”; if someone can provide examples, I’d reconsider my decision. —MisterSynergy (talk) 10:12, 29 January 2017 (UTC)
    With that comment I mean that Wikidata isn't only what we see in wikidata.org. Wikidata is (and we want it to be) a knowledge base used by the other Wikimedia projects, third-party projects and lots of external applications of all kinds (currently, even Google uses it for its searches). While vandalising a label for a property can mislead some users in Wikidata without greater impact (as labels aren't interpreted by machines, only by humans), other fatal changes, in the worst-case scenario, could harm, until vandalism is reverted, the entire Wikidata ontology and the we-don't-know-which projects and applications that could load the ontology in that state. --abián 11:33, 29 January 2017 (UTC)
    That’s still pretty abstract. I can imagine that changing URL patterns could be malicious for instance, or maybe even changes in equivalent property (P1628). However most information in property items is not critical, and I would prefer to keep properties unprotected for now. As an alternative: can we technically use abuse filters for critical parts (e.g. prevent URL pattern changes by anons and new users)? —MisterSynergy (talk) 12:28, 29 January 2017 (UTC)
    Yes, we can. I hadn't thought of that possibility, and I like the idea if there's no consensus on this. I would also like to have a filter that let unregistered users add new labels but which didn't let them modify or remove the existent ones, but this filter wouldn't be possible because users couldn't revert their own mistakes. --abián 13:05, 29 January 2017 (UTC)
  •  Comment I am not adverse to the proposal if we can demonstrate a low percentage of useful edits, though I would like to see if we can utilise other tools to weed out bad edits first. We should be able to utilise abuse filter rules to more easily monitor changes in that namespace, and test and challenge IP edits, or brand new accounts on their edit with a constructive message, and let confirmed accounts pass through.  — billinghurst sDrewth 10:17, 29 January 2017 (UTC)
  •  Support I see 2 reasons to limit changes in properties: first is vandalism and the second is avoid to see contributors changing the scope of the property by modifying the label/description/statemen once they have been set up. But this should be only if a translators team can provide the majority of the labels/descriptions after the property creation. Snipre (talk) 10:30, 29 January 2017 (UTC)
  •  Support —Wylve (talk) 10:35, 29 January 2017 (UTC)
  •  Comment have you tried flagging / reverting edits with ORES? protection; filters should be a last resort, not first resort. Slowking4 (talk) 12:59, 29 January 2017 (UTC)
  • My experience is that changes in items linked by country (P17) today affects large parts of svwiki. Vandalism there is de facto a larger problem than in the property-namespace. The effect of vandalism of Property-namespace is potentially more critical, but such vandalism is in reality very limited. -- Innocent bystander (talk) 13:23, 29 January 2017 (UTC)
  • Interesting. It could be useful to protect them from vandalism. MechQuester (talk) 13:48, 29 January 2017 (UTC)
  • It would be cool having the possibility of (semi)protecting statements in properties, but leaving labels and descriptions aside. Strakhov (talk) 14:44, 29 January 2017 (UTC)

Alternative proposal

I propose that:

  1. Before phab:T47224 is fixed:
    1. Non-autoconfirmed users can only add (not change or remove) labels, descriptions, aliases and claims of a property;
    2. And probably in addition, IP users may not edit properties (unclear whether this is a good idea, maybe we should only enforce the former).
    Both may be enforced by abusefilters.
  2. After phab:T47224 is fixed: any non-autoconfirmed users must provide a summary while editing properties. Later the restriction(s) above may be rescinded if the level of vandalism become lower.--GZWDer (talk) 19:49, 5 February 2017 (UTC)

Quick statements

Is it possible to add qualifiers to existing statements, using eg Quick Statements ?

I tried, but it seemed that Quick Statements wouldn't re-write the old statement to add qualifiers unless I had first deleted it -- but there doesn't seem to be the possibility to include the deletion in the batch process. Jheald (talk) 00:29, 6 February 2017 (UTC)

On the other hand, it seems that Magnus's new experimental Quick Statements version 2 can do this, so all looks good. Jheald (talk) 00:44, 6 February 2017 (UTC)

flaws in property ethnic group (P172)

There are a couple of problems with the property ethnic group (P172):

  • There is a requirement for sourced claims on Property talk:P172, but apparently more than 97% of the claims are unsourced (~30600 of 31400 as far as I see). There is obviously no possibility to repair this problem by adding sources to all of these claims. Shall we either remove the requirement for sources, or enforce the requirement otherwise (e.g. by removal of unsourced claims)? We had a similar situation with sexual orientation (P91) last summer/fall with ~5000 affected claims (were removed). Similarly as in the sexuality case, information about the ethnic group can potentially be quite delicate for the persons which our items describe.
  • This property was created by @אבגד in March 2013, without a formal discussion as the talk page claims. I have no idea whether this was normal back then, but is this okay?
  • The covi page lists plenty of values which are not properly defined. This could have to do with the difficult definition of an abstract concept such as the one of this property. Could we please clearly define this property, or shall it be one of the messy “everything links to everything” properties in future? I am unfortunately not very qualified to work on the definition in this field…
  • Recently a couple of cases appeared in which (anon) users added many values on this property within an item about a single person (example Q28445472#P172 see below). Is this property really suitable for such an approach?

I’d like to raise attention for this property in the community and invite all Wikidata users to participate in this discussion. Depending on the outcome we might want to take some action or not… Thanks, MisterSynergy (talk) 09:24, 30 January 2017 (UTC)

Responding to some of your bullet points:
  • It appears that only 196 statements have a proper source, so removing all the unsourced ones would delete almost all the data for this property. We're supposed to notify projects which are using the property before making big changes, so if we do want to delete all the unsourced ones, I would suggest that we tell the projects using our data and give them a period of time to either add sources to the existing data or add the data locally before doing any mass deletions.
  • I don't think the way it was created really matters at this point. If we think it's useful, we should keep it, if we don't, we should delete it.
  • There is one anonymous user with a frequently changing IP address who keeps adding lots of ethnic group statements (who is responsible for both of your examples and probably most of the other cases of multiple statements). Without a better definition of what this property should contain, it's hard to say whether or not it's right to do that. However, that user has been repeatedly blocked for bad edits (not only the ethnic group statements), if you spot them editing again, it's probably worth letting the admins know.
- Nikki (talk) 11:46, 3 February 2017 (UTC)
Thanks for your response.
  • We had a similar situation with the mentioned sexual orientation (P91) property last year, and I finally ended up removing ~5.000 unsourced claims with that property after discussion here at WD:PC (links can be found on Property talk:P91). Until now only ~25 unsourced claims have re-appeared, but most of the data was lost during this process (it is likely still available via categorization etc. in Wikipedias). In this case of ethnic group (P172) I do not want to suggest to necessarily take the same action, but the obvious discrepance of theoretical source requirement and practical lack of sources worries me. I therefore asked for consensus of either a removal of data or a removal of this requirement, with no real personal preference on either of these options.
  • Regarding the definition: I have no useful knowledge about the concept of ethnic groups, thus I can’t help much in a definition process. This topic only came to my attention due to RC patrolling, where lots of questionable edits showed up recently. If this situation of lacking definition is not going to be solved soon, we end up with another messy “everything-links-to-everything” property which is no longer going to be useful for any application. We should seriously avoid a situation where tons of crappy legacy claims pile up that we practically cannot get rid of just because it is heavily used in Wikipedias. The earlier these problems are fixed, the less trouble we have. Unfortunately we don’t have useful procedures in place.
Again, thanks for your comment. I hope that more editors add their opinion on this problem here. Regards, —MisterSynergy (talk) 12:11, 3 February 2017 (UTC)
Like you, I also have no real preference and don't really know enough about it to help define it. :/ I don't have any objections to removing them, I would just like to see it done in a way which is sensitive to the other projects using our data - we don't want to put people off using our data because we keep suddenly mass deleting things without any warning. - Nikki (talk) 16:27, 3 February 2017 (UTC)
I would be fine with removal of unsourced data via a bot. ChristianKl (talk) 16:07, 3 February 2017 (UTC)

Big amount of adding was made by me. Information abuot ethnicity I took from sources joined to items with described by source (P1343). I didnt join those directly, because all/nearly all properities have the same source. Nearly only ethnic group (P172) → Armenians (Q79797) with Armenian Soviet Encyclopedia (Q2657718), Karabakh War 1988–1994 (Q16392167). Sources (books), that have not WD item are planned to get them and be joined. - Kareyac (talk) 05:51, 5 February 2017 (UTC)

@Kareyac: I already noticed that, since Armenians (Q79797) is heavily used with this property. If almost all of your claims have the same source, it might be possible to add sources to your claims automatically. The amount of extra items would be small, the major task would be to compile a list of “item, value, source claims”, e.g. in an Excel sheet. —MisterSynergy (talk) 21:28, 5 February 2017 (UTC)
@MisterSynergy: Thank for good advise, I'll follow it when find Kareyac-friendly tutorial for Quickstatments. I stopped at importing QXXX-looking WD items list from PetScan. Would it be easier and faster to ask a bot holder to copy-paste from described by source (P1343) to ethnic group (P172) of the same item? It can be more effective, because many described by source (P1343) include details like page number page(s) (P304), which are different. - Kareyac (talk) 07:09, 6 February 2017 (UTC)
It would be important to compile complete references according to Help:Sources. How they exactly look like depends on the reference’s type of work (website, database, book, etc…). For printed books (as in your case, as far as I can see), one particularly needs the chapter/page in a given edition of this work for each claim separately. If that information was available in a spreadsheet, it is indeed possible to add complete references to existing claims by bot (without that much bot knowledge), but as far as I know not with QuickStatements.
The sheer number of affected claims might be a problem. Following this query, there are ~8.200 claims “P172:Armenian”. We need page/chapter information for each one separately… —MisterSynergy (talk) 12:49, 6 February 2017 (UTC)

Rank

How civile service rank Active State Councillor (Q2623484) can be added to person’s item? noble title (P97) looks like. - Kareyac (talk) 07:38, 6 February 2017 (UTC)

Quality Criteria for Building a Tool to Evaluate Item Quality

Hi everyone!

As we all know, data quality is very important for Wikidata. We always strive to improve our data quality, so that we can make it usable for more use cases.

At the moment, I am exploring the usage of machine learning to evaluate item quality. I am aiming to develop a kind of ORES for evaluating item quality. This will allow us to grade item quality. Furthermore, it enables us to easily find low quality items and fix them. As a result, we can improve the data quality of the whole Wikidata.

As the first step to develop the mentioned tool, I am going to launch a campaign for grading the quality of Wikidata items in the near future. I have made the criteria for each quality grade which is based on Wikidata:Showcase_items.

I would like to ask your opinion if I have made appropriate criteria for each quality grade. Any suggestions pertaining to this would be welcomed!

Proposed criteria


You can find the criteria below:

Grade A
Criteria:

  • Large number of statements with:
  1. References for non-trivial statements (references other than Wikimedia projects)
  2. Appropriate ranks
  3. Qualifiers
  • Large number of completed translations: labels, descriptions, and labels of used properties
  • All appropriate sitelinks to corresponding Wikimedia projects
  • All appropriate aliases exist in most languages
  • If applicable, there is an image associated with the item

Grade B
Criteria:

  • Good number of statements with:
  1. References for non-trivial statements (references other than Wikimedia projects)
  2. Appropriate ranks
  3. Qualifiers where applicable
  • Good number of completed translations: labels, descriptions, and labels of used properties
  • A few missing sitelinks to corresponding Wikimedia projects. You might need to check whether the item actually have an article in other Wikimedia projects (e.g. Wikipedia) and does not have the sitelink to that article.
  • Almost all appropriate aliases exist in most languages
  • If applicable, there is an image associated with the item

Grade C
Criteria:

  • Moderate number of statements with:
  1. References for non-trivial statements (references other than Wikimedia projects)
  2. Appropriate ranks
  3. Qualifiers where applicable
  • Moderate number of completed translations: labels, descriptions, and labels of used properties
  • Moderate number of missing sitelinks to corresponding Wikimedia projects. You might need to check whether the item actually have an article in other Wikimedia projects (e.g. Wikipedia) and does not have the sitelink to that article.
  • Appropriate aliases exist only in some languages
  • Although it is applicable, there is no image associated with the item

Grade D
Criteria:

  • A few statements with:
  1. References for non-trivial statements (references other than Wikimedia projects)
  2. Appropriate ranks
  3. Qualifiers where applicable
  • A few completed translations: labels, descriptions, and labels of used properties
  • Many missing sitelinks to corresponding Wikimedia projects. You might need to check whether the item actually have an article in other Wikimedia projects (e.g. Wikipedia) and does not have the sitelink to that article.
  • Appropriate aliases exist only in a few languages
  • Although it is applicable, there is no image associated with the item

Grade E
All items that do not match grade “D” criteria.

You may find the criteria is vague. For instance, “large number of completed translations”, how do we define/quantify ‘large number’? however, this is intentional as I want the campaign participants to use their common sense (i.e. their own definition of ‘large number’) in grading the item quality.

Thanks a bunch! :)

--Glorian Yapinus (WMDE) (talk) 15:09, 30 January 2017 (UTC)

  • Happy to see you're having a shot at this. I already noticed some tasks floating around in fabricator. I'll break down the reasoning a bit more. Things we could measure that indicates quality:
  • Labels (the more the better)
  • Aliases (already a bit more complicated, depends on the domain if aliases are even available)
  • Description (the more the better)
  • Statements
    • The number of statements
    • The number of unique P statements (this would filter out items which have a lot of statements of one property type)
    • The statement coverage for a domain, for example for instance of (P31) -> human (Q5) we expect sex or gender (P21) and some others. This will enable wikiprojects to define quality criteria for their subject area just like
    • Something with qualifiers
    • Something with ranks (doesn't seem to be used a lot)
    • References, real references a lot of good ones
    • Quality of the linked items. For an item to reach the highest class, the linked items need to have a minimum quality too otherwise I'll see a lot of statements not in my language
Sitelinks are a bit tricky. Basically everything on Wikipedia is linked with something here because people ran bots. Could be used the other way around, if an item has sitelink in language qqq, the label and description needs to be set in language qqq to reach a certain level
I would not invent a new scale but just base it on en:Wikipedia:Version_1.0_Editorial_Team/Assessment#Quality_scale. Multichill (talk) 15:34, 30 January 2017 (UTC)
I've boldly created Wikidata:Item quality and filled it with this proposed scale so that we can iterate there. (No harm keeping the conversation here for now though.) Multichill, I'm a fan of adopting the enwiki language -- e.g. "Stub" through "Featured Item". But I'm not sure we can directly make use of the criteria for each level of the enwiki scale in Wikidata. We'll need to iterate on what we *mean* for each level of the scale. It's critical that we capture the core idea in the description of this scale and that we have general agreement among those who will help us do the labeling so that ORES can learn from a consistent set of assessments. --EpochFail (talk) 16:00, 30 January 2017 (UTC)
Multichill, thanks for the suggestion! I think I have added most of the criteria that you mentioned. In particular to the item description, I think we cannot rely on it to measure item quality because there are a lot of high quality items (e.g. showcase items) which have short description. --Glorian Yapinus (WMDE) (talk) 14:13, 31 January 2017 (UTC)
Glorian: Item description would be a boolean per language (either you have it or not). The more languages that have description, the better. Same as for labels. Multichill (talk) 16:17, 31 January 2017 (UTC)
Gotcha. Thanks Multichill! --Glorian WD (talk) 16:13, 1 February 2017 (UTC)
  • Instead of one quality indicator I would propose 3 indicators:
  • one about labels and descriptions (number of labels, number of labels with a description)
  • one about the number of statements with references (number of statement with a reference, number of statement with several references)
  • one about the number of critical statements according to the class of the item. In the case of people, having both birth and death date with corresponding locations is more valuable than having an item without any birth and death information but plenty of identifiers.
Snipre (talk) 16:16, 30 January 2017 (UTC)
Snipre, are you referring to 3 quality indicators for each quality grade? for instance, quality grade A have 3 indicators: one about labels and descriptions (number of labels, number of labels with a description), one about the number of statements with references (number of statement with a reference, number of statement with several references), and one about the number of critical statements according to the class of the item. --Glorian Yapinus (WMDE) (talk) 13:42, 31 January 2017 (UTC)
@Glorian Yapinus (WMDE): Yes, because contributors can have different objectives: some to work more on translations so they will try to improve items poorly translated in terms of label/descriptions, some want to improve the statement quality by adding good sources,... Snipre (talk) 18:32, 31 January 2017 (UTC)
Breaking that quality indicator into many indicators could enable us to add later more special indicators. For example an additional indicator about the quality of film items (have they many or few film data, ...) or biography items (born when and where, occupation, ...). --Molarus 23:40, 31 January 2017 (UTC)
I would say this is a very good idea. But, I think at this stage, we should start with one quality indicator and see how does it go. If it turns out to be a useful tool, we can try to implement 3 quality indicators. Nevertheless, I could consider to add "number of critical (expected) statements according to the item class" to the proposed quality criteria. Thanks for your feedback Snipre, Molarus! --Glorian WD (talk) 16:37, 1 February 2017 (UTC)
  • In terms of statements, one should also look at the precision/fine-grained-ness of the statements. For example for location-type statements, is the given location just a country, or is it a city.
It would also be good to think more explicitly about completeness -- if an item includes administrative entities, are all the relevant entities included?
These kind of metrics need to be developed for more properties. Jheald (talk) 17:44, 30 January 2017 (UTC)
Could you give me a specific example of what do you mean with "for location-type statements, is the given location just a country, or is it a city"? I agree that we should take into account of relevant properties in items. I would consider about that. Thank you Jheald. --Glorian WD (talk) 16:43, 1 February 2017 (UTC)
The classic one is located in the administrative territorial entity (P131), pointing to something other than the most detailed applicable level. For example, at the moment for Eiffel Tower we have P131 -> 7th Arrondissement, which is good. But other monuments may have P131 -> Paris or even P131 -> France. So one question we should be trying to formulate, and track, is: are the values as detailed as we would hope for? Jheald (talk) 17:45, 1 February 2017 (UTC)
Got it. Thanks! --Glorian WD (talk) 20:10, 1 February 2017 (UTC)
  • Well, wonderful. But what does it bring us and how does it add value. It is in my opinion something that adds little. I do not care about "categories" I care about quality. This is a stand alone construct that has not much to do with quality, Thanks, but no thanks GerardM (talk) 22:33, 30 January 2017 (UTC)
Hi GerardM, I think if we can grade the item quality, it paves the way to develop a tool for quickly discovering low quality items. This allows those items to be immediately fixed (i.e. improve the item quality). Ultimately, we can increase the quality of items in Wikidata. --Glorian Yapinus (WMDE) (talk) 15:32, 31 January 2017 (UTC)
Check out our statistics. We have 2,609,121 items with no statements. We have 5,667,036 with only one statement. Please focus attention on the things that matter. THIS is where quality is lacking. Thanks, GerardM (talk) 18:44, 31 January 2017 (UTC)
  • I think it would be more useful to have a tool to recognize which items are lacking attention... I see little point in giving a score to an item, but perhaps it would be more useful to recognize which items have potential for growth. It could be a metric based on item page views, sitelinks, number of statements and labels.--Micru (talk) 15:05, 31 January 2017 (UTC)
Hi Micru, if we already able to grade item quality, then I think it is possible to develop a tool for quickly finding low quality items (i.e. items that have the potential to be improved further). --Glorian Yapinus (WMDE) (talk) 15:23, 31 January 2017 (UTC)
Finding an item that can be improved further is quite easy given that most items are in that class. Could you describe a user story of how you imagine this is going to be used? ChristianKl (talk) 17:21, 31 January 2017 (UTC)
  • +1 to Micru; the proposed criteria would produce ratings which strongly correlate with the absolute importance of the entity described, since the number of statements and/or sitelinks naturally favors important concepts. It would be valuable from an editors point of view if fairly good grades (but perhaps not excellent grades) can be achieved for less important concepts and items as well. We’d otherwise just calculate relevance, not quality. The number of sitelinks is perhaps the best “external” measure of absolute relevance, so maybe we should use it for weighting of a rating, not as an additive input. —MisterSynergy (talk) 15:30, 31 January 2017 (UTC)
I think that we're using a wrong and partial definition of "quality". With the exposed points we're esentially measuring, in a broad sense, completeness, a quality dimension. In my opinion, we can't say that we're fully measuring quality if we're not measuring consistency.
Even to measure completeness in this broad sense, we should take into account that some statements using certain properties never, or hardly ever, need a reference, while it's terrible that some statements using certain other properties (such as charge (P1595) or date of death (P570)) have no references. As well, not having a label/description in English is much worse than not having it in Kölsch (with all my respect to Kölsch).
Thanks for your help! --abián 16:57, 31 January 2017 (UTC)
PS: I like the idea of classifying items in degrees of completeness. ;-) --abián 17:06, 31 January 2017 (UTC)
  • Could you explain why you think building a tool to automatically grade items is a valuable usage of Wikimedia development resources? It feels to me like there are many more important priorities like those on the community wish list. ChristianKl (talk) 17:21, 31 January 2017 (UTC)
    Indeed, I absolutely agree, there are other priorities which are more important; for example, detecting and preventing constraint violations and vandalism, which are expected to grow over time without a large community that can watch and avoid them. However, Glorian Yapinus is a student who may want to work on completeness, and it's better to have Glorian helping Wikidata by measuring its completeness than not to have Glorian helping Wikidata, I appreciate his decision and thank him for his help. --abián 17:58, 31 January 2017 (UTC)
Okay, I didn't know that Glorian is a student. Given that he's listed as WMDE I thought of him as a normal employee. ChristianKl (talk) 22:30, 31 January 2017 (UTC)
  • (EC) Wow! Lots of skepticism here. Well, first of all, the article quality prediction models for Wikipedia have been a break away success. "Completeness" is a good way to think about what these models capture. It's incredibly useful to know how complete a Wikipedia article is. People use them to route edit recommendations work (e.g. ), measure the completeness of subsets of the wiki (e.g. slides), and to help students know when their article drafts are ready to be published in the main namespace (see the WikiEdu dashboards. I can't compare the urgency of building this model as opposed to working on other wishlist items, but I think this is likely to be highly valuable and we're actually positioned to execute on it. See m:ORES. We've already built and deployed models to help catch vandalism in Wikidata (enable the mw:ORES review tool in your beta features). Now, we're working to bring Wikidata support in ORES to the same level as some of the big Wikipedias. This quality model is the next step. --EpochFail (talk) 18:03, 31 January 2017 (UTC)
    yes, break away success until it makes conclusions that paradoxically challenge sacred cows, like "be nice to vandals" then it's, "what POV cruft is that." unfortunately with ritualistic behavior, facts don't matter. as we see here, they did not invent it so who is this Epoch cat, and who is WMDE to tell us what to do? lol. Slowking4 (talk) 02:00, 2 February 2017 (UTC)
  • Having an algorithm to decide whether an article draft is ready to be published to the Wikipedia main namespace is useful but there's no equivalent of draft items in Wikidata. In Wikipedia an article mainly stands on it's own. If you add information about the spouse of a Bob in Wikipedia, you can simply write in the article that Alice is the spouse. In Wikidata you create an extra item for Bob. If that extra item has little statements, the proposal here suggests it get's flagged as a low-quality item that needs improvement.
If I have a project in Wikipedia to improve the coverage of human muscles than I might be interested in having a list of low quality articles about muscles. On Wikidata it works differently. I might instead look at a property like innervates (P3190) and work through adding information about it to our muscle items.
When it comes to adding translations the process is similar. I don't decide that a certain item doesn't have enough translations and seek to translate the specific item into 10 new languages. I rather look at a group of items that are missing labels in a language I know and add the data.
When it comes to the data that Wikipedia imports Wikipedia also doesn't directly care about item quality. It cares about statement quality. It cares about the individual statements providing true information that's referenced. An idea to judge Wikidata items quality by simply quantify metrics wouldn't help at all with those concerns.
In general quality data is data that's correct. Measuring quantity of statements in an item doesn't measure the quality. Measuring quantity is easier than measuring the actual quality but there are possible negative effects when we pretend that quantity and quality are the same thing. The proposed quality metric would call it quality to import a lot of low quality data from low quality databases provided the low quality database is referenced. ChristianKl (talk) 22:24, 31 January 2017 (UTC)
Thanks for your opinion ChristianKl. So if I am understand you correctly, you think that quality is more to the accuracy of the data (i.e. whether the data is correct) than the quantity of data in items right? --Glorian WD (talk) 16:00, 1 February 2017 (UTC)
On of the goals of Wikidata is to have data that the individuals Wiki's want to import. I think that some of the data I added about "innveration" is higher quality than the data at some Wiki because it's more precise. It contains information about which branch of a nerve innervates a muscle and not only the name of the general muscle. I consider being more precise a sign of quality.
If you look at the enwiki discussion we have lately their core data quality complaints are lack of references and false data. While there are other use cases of Wikidata then Wikipedia imports, it's an important use case for many contributors and your quality metrics don't help with optimizing for Wikipedia imports.
If I look at the field of protein databases I would say that TREMBL has higher quantity and Swissprot has higher quality. Swissprot quality comes through it being better curated.
Instead of looking at item quality it might be worth to try to estimate property quality for a domain. If Wikipedia discusses whether to integrate a certain property into a template that's a decision where quality has to be assessed. Is the data in question of high enough quality to provide an added benefit for Wikipedia? ChristianKl (talk) 17:13, 1 February 2017 (UTC)
Swissprot has curated data true. But it does not make its data of higher quality. Swissprot has a backlog that is huge. It is not up to date. My point is not to slag Swissprot but to break your argument. Quality is not only because of its curation but also because of completeness. If Wikidata is to make a difference it is particularly important to import and curate data. It is best done by comparison with other sources. Quality is in having a practical relevance to all the sources that connect to us. Including Wikipedias including Swissprot. Thanks, GerardM (talk) 07:00, 2 February 2017 (UTC)
precision is different from accuracy or quality. [2]. it is unclear what the quality of wikidata necessary to merit inclusion among some communities. they seem to say they will only include with a reference, which is verification, but not quality. Slowking4 (talk) 02:07, 2 February 2017 (UTC)
What I have observed is that inclusion is arbitrary. It has to do with the agenda of people and the faulty perception that Wikidata is superior. It is not; we do our own thing. Thanks, GerardM (talk) 07:28, 7 February 2017 (UTC)

Quality but differently

When an item is to have quality, there are a few things to consider. First of all many items are associated with articles. Articles link to other articles and consequently these articles are related. When these article links are associated with statements in an item, the item is a reflection of the article and, that is quality.

Often items are associated with lists or categories. It would be good to consider what such a list or category stands for and, it is great when all the articles, the items are reflected when you research such an item. This is particularly true because fairly often the links in a project do not connect properly. When a list is completely available in Wikidata, there may be both red links and wikilinks that are associated with the list. Quite often different language editions have a different set of articles that are associated. Wikidata brings this all together.

Quality is not so much associated with items in Wikidata but in the relations with other items. When we seek to find items that are of high quality, we should concentrate on these relations because this is how we can even help Wikipediass to do better. Thanks, GerardM (talk) 12:12, 1 February 2017 (UTC)

Wikimedia Foundation is hiring community members as strategy coordinators

Hello all! At the moment, the Wikimedia Foundation is hiring 20 contractors - 17 strategy coordinators for specialized languages and 3 Metawiki coordinators. I was am posting this on your noticeboard to reach out to any community members who would be both interested in being a part time contractor with us for three months and a good fit for any of the movement strategy facilitation roles. Even if you are not personally interested in the position, we would appreciate your assistance in encouraging community members to apply, either individually or with local wiki announcements. You can find the Job Description for the position at this page. There is a less-formal description of the tasks they would be working on here on Meta. Kbrown (WMF) (talk) 19:08, 6 February 2017 (UTC)

Alexa rank

Should values for Alexa rank (P1661) with no date qualifier be removed? Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 15:42, 7 February 2017 (UTC)

There are only 10 claims with this problem (assuming this quickly built query is okay). This could practically be fixed manually, at least if a source is provided. If not, I would recommend to remove the value. —MisterSynergy (talk) 16:02, 7 February 2017 (UTC)

United States

I propose changing the English label for United States of America (Q30) to United States, for consistency with the English/Simple article names as well as common usage. Nikkimaria (talk) 00:16, 7 January 2017 (UTC)

I am not sure this is a good idea. It may well be that "United States" is unambiguous for native English speakers, but there are plenty of non-native speakers who use Wikidata. Consistency with the article names does not seem any kind of argument: plenty of cases where the label is (and must be) entirely different from an article name. - Brya (talk) 08:07, 7 January 2017 (UTC)
It is fine to add an alias but it is the official name. Following the names of any Wikipedia is an extremely bad idea. In many cases there is no proper fit between the article and the item. Thanks, GerardM (talk) 08:11, 7 January 2017 (UTC)
@Brya: Help:Label indicates that we should use "the smallest unit of information that names an item" even if that unit is ambiguous, and that we should use the most common name - both of those support the change. Further, @GerardM: it indicates that we should consult the corresponding Wikipedia page for guidance on what the most common name is. It doesn't say to use official name at all. Nikkimaria (talk) 13:18, 7 January 2017 (UTC)
Well, the Help:Label page is beginning to look a little out of date, but even Help:Label is less strict than you make it appear, to quote:
"Wikimedia page title may give orientation
To figure out the most common name, it is good practice to consult the corresponding Wikimedia project page (for example, the title of a Wikipedia article). In many cases, the best label for an item will either be the title of the corresponding page on a Wikimedia project or a variation of that title. [...]"
Brya (talk) 13:44, 7 January 2017 (UTC)
Yes. Any good reason not to do that in this case? The guidance of that page in sum supports "United States" much more strongly than it does "United States of America". Nikkimaria (talk) 17:05, 7 January 2017 (UTC)
@Brya: Nikkimaria (talk) 13:56, 8 January 2017 (UTC)

There are so many instances where the Wikipedia article is just a choice to allow for disambiguation that the notion that it is the best fit is plain wrong in practice. Thanks, GerardM (talk) 14:30, 7 January 2017 (UTC)

I suggest you raise that general point at Help talk:Label, but in this particular case that is not a concern. Nikkimaria (talk) 17:05, 7 January 2017 (UTC)
We still have United States of Brazil, so that the United States is ambiguous.--Ymblanter (talk) 20:52, 7 January 2017 (UTC)
@Ymblanter: And per Help:Label we resolve potential ambiguity by using the description, not by extending the label. Nikkimaria (talk) 13:56, 8 January 2017 (UTC)
You're right that we don't have to include disambiguating information in the label, but this isn't just extending the label, "United States of America" is a name in actual use, e.g. on coins, notes, passports, so they're both valid names. Looking at other countries, we're pretty inconsistent in whether we use official names or the common shortened version... - Nikki (talk) 15:14, 8 January 2017 (UTC)
The most common name is what we're meant to be using, which here is "United States". Nikkimaria (talk) 17:04, 8 January 2017 (UTC)
@Nikki: Nikkimaria (talk) 01:15, 10 January 2017 (UTC)

@Nikkimaria: What advantages do you expect to be gained by this change? [Also, please note the section, above, #Nikkimaria, where you were pinged.] Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 21:05, 7 January 2017 (UTC)

In addition to being more in tune with the guidance for labels, this change would provide advantages for the use of Wikidata on other projects. (Hm, for some reason I did not get that ping...) Nikkimaria (talk) 21:09, 7 January 2017 (UTC)
"The advantages are that it would provide advantages"? Please be more specific. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 16:39, 9 January 2017 (UTC)
It would ensure that data passed through from Wikidata is consistent with the terminology in use on our major English-language projects, to begin with. Nikkimaria (talk) 01:15, 10 January 2017 (UTC)
Is there any reason not to follow the guidance of Help:Label in this case? Nikkimaria (talk) 02:14, 11 January 2017 (UTC)
It is guidance and not every page and every answer fits within general guidance. Present a decent case about why the change is valuable, not ducking and weaving with indirect reference to a page. In this case, I have specifically said to you that people may wish to use the label through the modules. You have not presented a reasoned case about why your change is better, and I dispute your unsubstantiated and personal opinion that it is advantageous. We are talking about the country, not its possessive use, so please don't try the fake and vague "consistency argument." We use United Kingdom for the country, and British for the people, and so on. The country is the United States of America and there are the other regular uses United States, USA, American, ... depending on context of the usage required use away in the aliases.  — billinghurst sDrewth 13:14, 11 January 2017 (UTC)
(a) Yes, it is guidance, but unless we have good reason to do otherwise we should follow it. (b) And as I've told you, use of the label through the modules is a good reason to use the more common term as the label, as this will avoid having to override the value in multiple locations. "United States" is appropriate in more cases than is "United States of America", on projects that use the former, in templates or tables where space is at a premium, etc. (c) To summarize: Such a change would be in line with the guidance of Help:Label as well as both common usage and the terms in use in our major English-speaking Wikipedias. (d) What are you talking about with "possessive use"? We use "United Kingdom" for the country, not "United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland", because although the latter is the official name the former is the common name.
So now, what is your "reasoned case" for using the less common label, despite the guidance not to and the practical implications of this choice? Nikkimaria (talk) 02:38, 12 January 2017 (UTC)
@Billinghurst: Nikkimaria (talk) 13:58, 13 January 2017 (UTC)
Many people do disagree with you. You insist on something that is imho and in the opinions of others arguably wrong and you get angry when people disagree with you. Why? Thanks, GerardM (talk) 05:38, 12 January 2017 (UTC)
I'm not angry, I'm simply asking that you and others provide a reason why following Help:Label and common usage is "arguably wrong". Nikkimaria (talk) 13:03, 12 January 2017 (UTC)
@Billinghurst: Do you have such a reason? Nikkimaria (talk) 23:52, 19 January 2017 (UTC)
@Brya, Billinghurst, Multichill, Nikki: Does anyone? Nikkimaria (talk) 00:29, 22 January 2017 (UTC)
Nobody agrees with you. Let it go. - Brya (talk) 05:44, 22 January 2017 (UTC)
@Brya: You're welcome to disagree with me, it'd just be nice if you had a good reason for doing so. Do you think Help:Label should be changed? If so, to what? If not, why not apply it here? Nikkimaria (talk) 00:36, 23 January 2017 (UTC)
Does anyone else have answers to these questions, or should we go ahead and make the change? Nikkimaria (talk) 00:51, 29 January 2017 (UTC)
No change. The good reason is "there is no consensus for the change". Can we move on yet?  — billinghurst sDrewth 10:08, 29 January 2017 (UTC)
@Billinghurts: Consensus is based on policies/guidelines/rationales, not voting. The "general guidance" in this case does not support your position, as explained above. Do you have a response to the questions to you above? Nikkimaria (talk) 13:46, 29 January 2017 (UTC)
Fix ping: @billinghurst: Nikkimaria (talk) 13:48, 29 January 2017 (UTC)
I believe that I have a pretty good knowledge, and demonstrated application, of the practice of consensus at Wikimedia. I believe that there is no consensus in this community for the change(s) that you propose. Personally, I generally try to express my point of view once, clarify later if needed, so as not to bore people with repetition, nor wish to be ignored through unnecessary dogmatism. While I am not always successful, I continue to try that as a practice, and it is my experience that it is respected and preferred.  — billinghurst sDrewth 21:43, 29 January 2017 (UTC)
@billinghurst: Well, in this particular case, I would prefer if you responded to the questions I posed above. I assure you I will not be bored by an actual rationale to not follow Help:Label or to change it. If there is no consensus in this community for that guidance page, it should be updated, lest others be misled into thinking there is. Nikkimaria (talk) 01:23, 30 January 2017 (UTC)
Hoi, Dear Nikkimaria, you have been told by multiple persons that they do not agree with your point of view. Your attitude is one where you want to force the issue. You are being aggressive and it is not appreciated. Thanks, GerardM (talk) 14:30, 29 January 2017 (UTC)
Dear @GerardM: I don't intend to force anyone to agree with my point of view, but the documentation of Help:Label should match what the community wants to implement, and it appears from the disagreement here that it does not. Nikkimaria (talk) 01:23, 30 January 2017 (UTC)
And you want to make a "should" a "must". You are repeating yourself and it is not welcome. I am particularly glad that we have no policy wonks like he once that ossify the English Wikipedia. Thanks, GerardM (talk) 06:37, 30 January 2017 (UTC)
If you feel that way, propose changes that will have the talk conform with our practice. Do not push change where it is not wanted. Thanks, GerardM (talk) 06:41, 30 January 2017 (UTC)
@GerardM: What exactly is "our practice", in your opinion? As mentioned above, we are inconsistent in whether we use common or official name, whether we follow article names or not, etc. Nikkimaria (talk) 02:29, 31 January 2017 (UTC)
It is inconsistent yes. We do not have good technology to use appropriate labels. When we are to standardise on logos, we need the technology to manage what is opportune. We do not have it and as far as I am concerned the status quo is to be preferred for arbitrary rules. Thanks, GerardM (talk) 06:45, 31 January 2017 (UTC)
@GerardM: So, in your opinion, "our practice" is that whomever adds a label decides from their own head what they think it should be, and then it never changes? They need make no reference to any guidance page or source? Nikkimaria (talk) 02:58, 1 February 2017 (UTC)
Did you read my answer. We cannot do a proper job on labels. It is deliberately made "easy" and consequently there is no way that a policy or whatever makes sense in all cases. In recognition of this sub standard situation your notions do not function as you imagine. No, I do not need a policy to tell me this. Thanks GerardM (talk) 05:58, 1 February 2017 (UTC)
@GerardM: I read your comment, and it seems to be consistent with my interpretation of it above - you think there should be no policy, and thus that whomever happens to add the label can do whatever they please. In that case you would argue that Help:Label should be deprecated? Nikkimaria (talk) 02:59, 2 February 2017 (UTC)
I personally prefer “United States of America” to differentiate ourselves from “United Mexican States,” “United States of Brazil,” etc. Bwrs (talk) 17:37, 1 February 2017 (UTC)

@Nikkimaria, Brya, GerardM, Ymblanter, Nikki, Pigsonthewing: this discussion is about the English label but FYI, in multiple other languages, the short/common/expected name is already use (at least French, German, Spanish, etc.). Cdlt, VIGNERON (talk) 18:58, 1 February 2017 (UTC)

Yes - another reason to change the English one. Nikkimaria (talk) 02:59, 2 February 2017 (UTC)
Given our policy I support changing it to the shorter name. I don't think it's likely that non-native speakers get confused by the shorter label. ChristianKl (talk) 12:11, 8 February 2017 (UTC)

You can now download a query result in SVG

download results menu

Hello all,

As you may know, when you run a query on the Query Service, you can download the result in different open formats (JSON, TSV, CSV). We just added a new button that allows you to download your graphs as a SVG image! Then with a software such as Inkscape (Q8041) you can easily modify the colors of the graph or make a nice picture to tweet with your query.

Note that this feature works with all the views except table, image grid, timeline, graph builder, map, and graph. If you encounter a problem, you can add a comment on the Phabricator task.

Lea Lacroix (WMDE) (talk) 15:32, 31 January 2017 (UTC)

Thanks to the developers for this: I really like the idea of sharing, say, a bubble chart as a file in its own right, rather than doing a screen capture. Would it be a small step to do this with graphs visualisations as well? Those, I find, benefit the most from clean-up in Inkscape. MartinPoulter (talk) 15:38, 7 February 2017 (UTC)
@Lea Lacroix (WMDE): Can you please file a ticket for that? --Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) (talk) 18:08, 7 February 2017 (UTC)
Done :) Lea Lacroix (WMDE) (talk) 13:16, 8 February 2017 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #246

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Development
    • You can now download query results as SVG images
    • When posting a link to an item to social networks and on messenger apps that show previews the previews will now be nicer and show an image. (phabricator:T51859)
    • We published the results of our research around Commons usage: How do heavy Commons users work? ...and what does that mean for structured data on Commons?
    • Setting up test system for federation (being able to use Wikidata's items and properties on Commons)
    • Setting up test system for lexemes
    • Setting up test system for improved change dispatching (sending notifications about edits on Wikidata to Wikipedia and co)
    • Doing more groundwork for lexemes
    • Working on better integration with Elastic
    • More work on Federation
    • Getting ready to deploy automated sitelinks for Wiktionary
    • Fixing a number of keyboard navigation issues based on your feedback
    • Working on the new datatype for geoshapes (phabricator:T57549)
    • Looking into linking more complicated external identifiers properly (phabricator:T151329)
    • Improved the link to the help portal on the query service (phabricator:T154993)

See all open tickets related to Wikidata.


Discussion

Please be careful with the last monthy task (merge via unique value constraint violations of GeoNames ID (P1566)). The bot-generated articles in cebwiki and svwiki contain a lot of mistakes particularly in connection with GeoNames, so mergers cannot be done straightforward without an individual in depth check of both items. —MisterSynergy (talk) 16:26, 7 February 2017 (UTC)

APS number

This is the number ascribed to a periodical in the American Periodical Series microfilms. For example The Knickerbocker is 949. Do we have this property? All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 21:34, 7 February 2017 (UTC).

@Rich Farmbrough: A search for "P:APS" (without quotes) finds nothing. A search for "P:American Periodical Series", likewise. (That's the best pattern for finding properties.) Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 21:55, 7 February 2017 (UTC)

Language of image legends for taxa

I've added an image, with a legend, to Menida (Q4043977). For now, I've said the language of the latter is Latin, but this is not strictly correct. How can I specify "no language"?

Also, might we one day be able to italicise a legend? Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 12:17, 8 February 2017 (UTC)

I think "mul" is the best language code to use atm. Sjoerd de Bruin (talk) 12:23, 8 February 2017 (UTC)
Help:Monolingual text languages gives a few other alternatives. How about zxx "no linguistic content, not applicable"? -- Innocent bystander (talk) 18:00, 8 February 2017 (UTC)
Thank you; that's preferable, if not perfect - I didn't know it was available to us. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 18:28, 8 February 2017 (UTC)

Problem with HarvestTemplates imports

Yesterday, I used my Pigsonthewing-bot account to import values for WCSPF ID (P3591), from |wcsp= in en:Template:Taxonbar. From over 17K templates, it found only ~23 values (example1 with this target page; value fetched from en:Eithea).

Today, User:Succu reports that "I had to remove almost all imported values because they are wrong.". (See example 2 - same item as example 1.)

Is there a bug in HarvestTemplates? Or should we stop importing values from Wikipedia due to improper use of templates there? Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 16:53, 8 February 2017 (UTC)

Better stop importing data from Wikipedia. We have now enough criticism about the low quality of WD statements (see the latest discussion on WP:EN). Snipre (talk) 17:15, 8 February 2017 (UTC)
This does not look like a technical bug in HarvestTemplates. As far as I can see there are two problems:
  • It is well-known that “Succu’s items” about taxa (I hope this is the correct term here) have high quality, which also applies for their identifiers. A simple imported from Wikimedia project (P143) “reference” is apparently substandard in this field, but this is the best HarvestTemplates can do (and good enough for may other fields). In your given example Succu improved that with a “standard reference”. It would be advisable to my opinion to let experienced editors in a given field do the import, and if no editor touches a property for a while you can start imports as a non-expert somewhat later. Succu took notice of the property proposal procedure.
  • Besides that there were indeed many wrong values, such as in this case. These wrong values are indeed contained in enwiki, for whatever reason. In a considerable fraction of the affected cases the imported identifier is identical to the Wikidata-Qid without the Q. I have no clue what happened here. It would help to check values for correctness before an import can start, at least some of them.
I guess you can be glad that only 17 value were found. Your import could’ve been much worse. —MisterSynergy (talk) 18:31, 8 February 2017 (UTC)
(ec) I agree. Some of the values in the harvested template are completely nonsens, e.g. en:Paeonia clusii has 7124094. --Succu (talk) 18:35, 8 February 2017 (UTC)

Label of Taiwan (Q865)

In light of discussions about United States of America (Q30)'s label above, I think it would be a good chance to talk about labels of Taiwan (Q865). As per numerous discussion being held on English Wikipedia regarding the entry's name, its is clear that Taiwan is picked as the current article name on English Wikipedia because it is the most well known name of the entry although it is not precise enough. As per discussions above, I think wikidata would have priority different from wikipedia and thus would favor a more precise despite a bit more mouthful name, Republic of China (Taiwan) ? C933103 (talk) 10:59, 3 February 2017 (UTC)

You might want to see an unarchived User talk:Neo-Jay discussion (visit that page and then Ctrl+F type "Q865"). --Liuxinyu970226 (talk) 13:09, 3 February 2017 (UTC)
I could almost see this unsolvable mess happening when the English Wikipedia renamed the articles. Oh well. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Deryck Chan (talk) 11:55, 7 February 2017 (UTC)
Why is Taiwan not supposed to be precise? What other entities are also named Taiwan? ChristianKl (talk) 08:08, 9 February 2017 (UTC)
@ChristianKl: fwiw, Taiwan (Q22502), Taiwan (Q57251), Taiwan (Q229312), Republic of Taiwan (Q716489), software performance testing (Q1982529), pulse-frequency modulation (Q2066418), Taiwan (Q18112781), Category:Taiwan Island (Q7087450) --Liuxinyu970226 (talk) 09:09, 9 February 2017 (UTC)
I don't see much room for confusion in that list. ChristianKl (talk) 09:32, 9 February 2017 (UTC)

Handling mistakes in imported data

User:Pasleim/Implausible/age lists items that have mistakes in dates of birth/death. They include vandalism, typos, bad merges but also bulk data imports. For instance, Jan Nicquet (Q21522558) died before he was born and does have a (reliable) source for that.

Do we have a process how to handle wrong data even if it's obvious that it's wrong? We have ranks but how do we know that some data is not correct if we don't know what is correct? (In this case, which date should be deprecated? Or both?) Matěj Suchánek (talk) 15:59, 6 February 2017 (UTC)

Deprecate both, this particular database entry is obviously not at all reliable. For each and every claim we have to judge whether it is “correct”, and this process is not always as easy as in this case. If the source data is not as faulty as in this case and if there are no contradictory claims in other sources, we just believe what the sources are saying. For that reason we don’t collect “correct” data (we don’t know that for sure), but we collect referenceable data. —MisterSynergy (talk) 16:34, 6 February 2017 (UTC)
No, inform the source so they can fix it. That's what I've done here. In this case these claims are supported by two books ([3] & [4]). In the next couple of weeks someone will walk downstairs into the library, have a look at the source and correct it.
RKDartists ID (P650) and RKDimages ID (P350) are curated databases of high quality, but curated by humans so mistakes happen. The Netherlands Institute for Art History (Q758610) has been very responsive and their curators have been investigation quite a few odd things we found. Multichill (talk) 20:36, 6 February 2017 (UTC)
It's really nice to see that some data maintainers take care of their database like this. I wonder how many other data providers are that reachable and where we could keep this information. Think of a property like issue tracker URL (P1401), for data donators. But there is a question if we are able to express the realtion between a piece of information with the reference and the donator. Matěj Suchánek (talk) 14:57, 7 February 2017 (UTC)
we are building relationships with GLAMs. they are unaccustomed to the quality control that a wiki can provide. they are used to paper methods. but it will be food for GLAM case study. Slowking4 (talk) 05:00, 9 February 2017 (UTC)

Quantity on ART UK links

Multichill (talk • contribs • logs) has asked me to seek some wider thoughts on the use of quantity (P1114) as a qualifier on Art UK artist ID (P1367), to indicate the number of paintings currently showing in the Art UK database associated with that particular Art UK identifier: see eg diff

I'm keen to have this because it seems to be valuable information to have in its own right; also potentially valuable for sorting and filtering; and, fundamentally, because I want to include it in a template for use on en-WP, where very often at the moment it is given as part of the text in the external links section: eg "133 Paintings by en:Titian at the Art UK site" -- giving the reader an indication of how much they're likely to find if they click the links.

Briefly, it seems to me there are two questions: where and how to add this information. (Okay maybe also a third: if we should add it, but I hope I've already spoken to that).

  • Where: To me it makes sense to add the information as a qualifier on P1367, rather than (say) on the main item, because the datum relates specifically to the number of paintings presented for the particular identifier. (Currently there are about 50 artists with two different identifiers, linking to two different pages at Art UK, with two different sets of paintings on them. It's useful to track these separately, eg to link to them separately). So to me it seems to make sense to store the information as some qualifier on the value of P1367.
  • How: Which property, in that case, to use? quantity (P1114) seemed the most generic, for a "quantity, total number, number of instances, number, amount, total" as its list of (English-language) equivalent names specifies for it -- in this case to record a "number of instances" of painting records attached to this identifier.

Of course, one could also create some special-purpose subproperty of P1114 specifically for this kind of use.

But for the moment, I'd quite like to get on, so that the data can be in place and complete and usable; and also, because I'd like to get a template rolled out using it on en-wiki.

If desired, it would seem to be a standard enough bot job at any time in the future to migrate the information from P1114 to any new more specific property that might be created for the purpose.

So I'd be grateful for quite prompt feedback. Firstly, would it be okay to finish the Quick Statements run to complete populating the P1114 qualifiers? (Currently about 8500 have been done out of a total 20,000 or so). Secondly, looking further forward, is quantity (P1114) the appropriate property to use for this qualifier, or would it make sense to create some new more-specific subproperty?

Follow-ups, please, to Property talk:P1367.

Thanks very much, Jheald (talk) 22:13, 6 February 2017 (UTC)

Update: @ChristianKl: I have proposed a new property specifically for this role, to take over from quantity (P1114), at Wikidata:Property_proposal/Authority_control#match_count. (Feel free to suggest a better name). In the meantime, I have resumed the run with Quick Statements to fill out the information using quantity (P1114) for the time being. Jheald (talk) 15:54, 9 February 2017 (UTC)

Concern about property creation by GZWDer

@GZWDer: created Wikidata:Property_proposal/BLF ID . As it stands there was an open an unanswered question by myself about the name of the property. I generally think that it isn't good when properties get created while there are still unresolved issues in the property proposal page.

Wikidata:Property_proposal/Danish_ancient_monument ID is similar. There's concern about the stability of the ID.

As it stands I question whether it's good that GZWDer has property creation rights. ChristianKl (talk) 16:59, 7 February 2017 (UTC)

  • Sorry for not noticing the question you asked.
  1. For BLF ID, there're consensus to create this property, and the original proposed name is valid. You may change the label per BOLD.
  2. For Danish ancient monument ID, Let ping @Alicia Fagerving (WMSE): for comment.

--GZWDer (talk) 17:11, 7 February 2017 (UTC)

I think in general the policy for property creation should be to check whether all issues brought forward on the page are resolved and not only whether they are upvotes. ChristianKl (talk) 17:42, 7 February 2017 (UTC)
I don’t think that the exact “property name” (here: English label) is relevant for the decision of the property creator whether or not a property should be created. Just go ahead and fix the label. In the other case I am not sure why Finn Årup Nielsen is concerned about “identifier” stability, but at a glance it looks as if this is a similar “identifier” as many others. —MisterSynergy (talk) 17:12, 7 February 2017 (UTC)
The creation of Biografiskt Lexikon för Finland ID (P3595) is fine. I might have waited for Danish ancient monument ID (P3596), but the question from Finn Årup Nielsen was preceded by a "support". An unqualified rule of "check whether all issues brought forward on the page are resolved" is not sensible, as it would allow a single vexatious editor to operate an embargo. Calling for the removal of the property-creator flag, especially without prior discussion, is overkill. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 21:57, 7 February 2017 (UTC)

Given the circumstances I agree that it was within GZWDer's remit to decide to create these properties and calling for creator right removal is overkill. Property names are editable. If it turns out in the future that these identifiers are unstable, we can head over to Wikidata:Properties for deletion, as has been done for a number of properties which referred to external databases that had later been shut down. Deryck Chan (talk) 12:35, 8 February 2017 (UTC)

I created the proposal and was perhaps the one not replying before the creation. I now changed the label using my everyman's rights to "BLF article ID". And I wish to thank GZWDer (talk • contribs • logs) for being helpful with the creation. – Susanna Ånäs (Susannaanas) (talk) 09:33, 9 February 2017 (UTC)

Native label

From here:

How I can add native label ?  – The preceding unsigned comment was added by Mr. Nijwmsa Boro (talk • contribs).

Using bots to programmatically feed (new) categories

Kopiersperre Jklamo ArthurPSmith S.K. Givegivetake fnielsen rjlabs ChristianKl Vladimir Alexiev Parikan User:Cardinha00 MB-one User:Simonmarch User:Jneubert Mathieudu68 User:Kippelboy User:Datawiki30 User:PKM User:RollTide882071 Andber08 Sidpark SilentSpike Susanna Ånäs (Susannaanas) User:Johanricher User:Celead User:Finnusertop cdo256 Mathieu Kappler RShigapov User:So9q User:1-Byte pmt Rtnf econterms Dollarsign8 User:Izolight maiki c960657 User:Automotom applsdev Bubalina Fordaemdur

Notified participants of WikiProject Companies

Hi,

I am asking info to comply with Wikidata policy and technical feasibility.

  • Is it possible to use bots to index information from websites programmatically to Wikidata?

This means scraping entity names and entity properties from the web and feed a collective repository.

  • What will be the source for new entities?
  • Category I would like to add is companies and startup ecosystem, adding factual information on stake-holders (investors, people). These is public information.
  • Please instruct on policy for running bots.

Anyone could suggest P2P web crawlers?

  • Can new entities be fed in programmatically as Special: new items, and then curate their organisation?

As example, I don't know if they could already fit in Wikidata:WikiProject Companies and properties (e.g.investors) may be a new category.

  • How to programmatically feed new properties that may not exist in a project, or that may vary in time?

As example, Assets, Number of employee. WikiProject Ontology has more than 50 participants and couldn't be pinged. Please post on the WikiProject's talk page instead.  – The preceding unsigned comment was added by Gg4u (talk • contribs) at 09:34, 9 February 2017‎ (UTC).

Yes, it's possible to import data with bots into Wikidata. https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/User:ProteinBoxBot is an example of a bot that imported a lot of biochemical data into Wikidata and does this well.
In general it's very useful to have the ID's of the database from which the data is imported. We have Crunchbase organization ID (P2088), Crunchbase person ID (P2087), Bloomberg person ID (P3052), Bloomberg company ID (P3377) and Wellfound ID (P3276). For other databases it would make sense to create a proposal for new properties.
Information that changes in time can be qualified with start time (P580), end time (P582) and point in time (P585)
Our policy for bots is: Wikidata:Bots ChristianKl (talk) 09:53, 9 February 2017 (UTC)

Boating

boating (Q2141830) is stated as a subclass of competitive boating (Q1295912). Both are labelled, in English, as "boating". There are separate articles in French. Can a French-English speaker please provide better English labels? Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 15:57, 6 February 2017 (UTC)

Hmm. en:Boating seems very similar to fr:Nautisme (encompassing both sport and leisure) while fr:Plaisance (loisir) seems to be purely "pleasure boating". I think the enwiki link is on the wrong wikidata item, and the label there should be changed to "pleasure boating". However, I don't know about the other wiki links. ArthurPSmith (talk) 16:51, 6 February 2017 (UTC)
@Pigsonthewing, ArthurPSmith: I propose we swap the "subclass" relation around and keep the interwiki links. Essentially boating (Q2141830) is "pleasure / recreation / sport boating as opposed to commercial boat travel". French is the only Wikipedia that further disambiguates between "pleasure boating" (plaisance) and "competitive sport using surface vessels" (nautisme). Deryck Chan (talk) 12:51, 8 February 2017 (UTC)
I've done as I proposed above as there's no objection. I've also merged fr:Navigation maritime, which boating (Q2141830) was a superclass of, into seamanship (Q351363). They cover very similar topics and had Q3337280 only had a French Wikipedia article. Deryck Chan (talk) 14:44, 14 February 2017 (UTC)
@Deryck Chan: Thank you. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 20:08, 14 February 2017 (UTC)
This section was archived on a request by: Deryck Chan (talk) 10:37, 15 February 2017 (UTC)

De-Recognition of Wikimedia Hong Kong

This is an update from the Wikimedia Affiliations Committee. Translations are available.

Recognition as a Wikimedia movement affiliate — a chapter, thematic organization, or user group — is a privilege that allows an independent group to officially use the Wikimedia trademarks to further the Wikimedia mission.

The principal Wikimedia movement affiliate in the Hong Kong region is Wikimedia Hong Kong, a Wikimedia chapter recognized in 2008. As a result of Wikimedia Hong Kong’s long-standing non-compliance with reporting requirements, the Wikimedia Foundation and the Affiliations Committee have determined that Wikimedia Hong Kong’s status as a Wikimedia chapter will not be renewed after February 1, 2017.

If you have questions about what this means for the community members in your region or language areas, we have put together a basic FAQ. We also invite you to visit the main Wikimedia movement affiliates page for more information on currently active movement affiliates and more information on the Wikimedia movement affiliates system.

Posted by MediaWiki message delivery on behalf of the Affiliations Committee, 16:25, 13 February 2017 (UTC) • Please help translate to your language • Get help

✓ Done marked
⟨ - ⟩ end time (P582) View with SQID ⟨ 2017-02-01 ⟩
--Liuxinyu970226 (talk) 10:02, 14 February 2017 (UTC)
This section was archived on a request by: Liuxinyu970226 (talk) 15:45, 15 February 2017 (UTC)

BnF ID assistance

Can someone please help me determine the correct BnF ID for Anacreontea (Q145973)? I can get this link to work, but can't get it to work using Bibliothèque nationale de France ID (P268), and the documentation for that property indicates a long history of problems like this one, with no solution given. --EncycloPetey (talk) 20:02, 13 February 2017 (UTC)

✓ Done Thanks, DeltaBot. --EncycloPetey (talk) 20:46, 13 February 2017 (UTC)
This section was archived on a request by: Matěj Suchánek (talk) 14:54, 15 February 2017 (UTC)

Constraint violation warning

Hi,

I just had an idea : wouldn't be more effective if a bot left a warning message on the editor's talk page after they add a statement violating a constraint ? The reason if that the constraint violation pages are a great tool but most editors never heard about it, a message on the talk page would probably be more effective.

Has anyone already thought of that ? Is it technically doable and socially desirable ?

Cdlt, VIGNERON (talk) 15:39, 1 February 2017 (UTC)

No, please, no more bot-messages on user_talks than necessary! It is terribly annoying already at Commons. Some other kind of message could maybe be an option. Like being "pinged" from somewhere. -- Innocent bystander (talk) 16:14, 1 February 2017 (UTC)
For example be pinged from the item's talk page. That's a good place for this message anyway. --Denny (talk) 17:27, 1 February 2017 (UTC)
@Innocent bystander, Denny: I must say I'm *not* a big fan of automated messages. Notification is a good idea to explore. Is it doable ? Cdlt, VIGNERON (talk) 17:54, 1 February 2017 (UTC)
Please don't use Talk pages for such a purpose: it makes it impossible to tell if there is actual content on it. - Brya (talk) 06:13, 2 February 2017 (UTC)
It can be done on Property talk page. --Infovarius (talk) 13:23, 2 February 2017 (UTC)
There is at least one Property Talk page which could not bear this. - Brya (talk) 18:54, 3 February 2017 (UTC)
@Brya: which one?
@Infovarius: how? can you do a test?
Cdlt, VIGNERON (talk) 15:30, 9 February 2017 (UTC)
Property talk:P225. - Brya (talk) 05:19, 10 February 2017 (UTC)

Death date *after* certain year?

When I handle biographies which state that the death date is 'not earlier than x' (like in ru:Балясников, Василий Фёдорович/Q4077141: 'not earlier than 1916'), it is clear that I should configure date of death (P570) as in this edit: date of death (P570) = unknown with qualifier earliest date (P1319) = 1916.

What value should I set for the same qualifier when date of death is said to be 'after x' (like in ru:Бибиков, Иван Степанович / Q4086234: 'after 1906')? My programmer gut says the value is exclusive ('after' meaning 'later than given year'), so I set date of death (P570) = unknown with qualifier earliest date (P1319) = 1907. Is this the correct approach, or should I use earliest date (P1319) = 1906? --Gikü (talk) 21:08, 9 February 2017 (UTC)

I just noticed that one of the aliases for earliest date (P1319) property is later than. That means I should go with 1906, right? --Gikü (talk) 21:11, 9 February 2017 (UTC)
More general question: do we have a Manual of Style (MOS) page summarising how to represent uncertain dates? It would be a useful thing, I think, to have how to represent all the different use-cases all gathered together and summarised in a single place.
In response to Gikü's direct question, I would think that in most cases 1906 is intended to be a possibility, but what has been written has been communicated lazily. In most cases I would understand "after 1906" to mean that there was a known event that occurred in 1906 at which it is known that the subject was alive; and after that no more is known of them. Jheald (talk) 21:16, 9 February 2017 (UTC)
I think the MOS you've asked is available at Help:Dates#Inexact dates. --Gikü (talk) 21:40, 9 February 2017 (UTC)
Thanks Gikü, that's a useful link. I notice that increasingly, if a date is say "between 1623 and 1628" people seem to be using unknown, earliest date 1623, latest date 1628; rather than "1620s" (as the help page seems to suggest) with the same qualifiers.
I can see that "unknown" is clearer (even though the date is not completely unknown), but doesn't putting in "unknown" mess up sorting in reports, whereas "1620s" would still place the person or event in pretty much the right place? Jheald (talk) 21:50, 9 February 2017 (UTC)

Wayback Machine URL added to references

Hi there, I'm relatively new to Wikidata, and I got my "official" introduction by watching Asaf Bartov's talk on YouTube. I was adding references to property values by copying and pasting URLs, and I was wondering if there was a reference property that gave space to an archiveurl from the Internet Archive's [web.archive.org Wayback Machine]. Linkrot is a big enough problem for me to use it a fair amount on Wikipedia, so I think Wikidata would benefit from such a property if it doesn't already have it. Can someone enlighten me on whether Wikidata has such a property for references, and if not, how to make it? Thanks, Icebob99 (talk) 02:16, 10 February 2017 (UTC)

Hi there, @Icebob99:! You're probably looking for archive URL (P1065), with qualifier archive date (P2960). Mahir256 (talk) 03:26, 10 February 2017 (UTC)
Thanks! That's exactly it. Icebob99 (talk) 03:55, 10 February 2017 (UTC)
Good to know, I didn't know that.--Alexmar983 (talk) 05:06, 10 February 2017 (UTC)

Vandalism out of control

Can anyone remind me why are IP edits allowed? There are not enough people watching recent changes and the vandalism backlog overflows staying there forever. I have been cleaning the last day of vandalism, and it is not a pleasurable task that I plan on repeating. If the community cannot keep up with the maintenance, why are we allowing anonymous edits?--Micru (talk) 11:10, 20 January 2017 (UTC)

Wikidata:Project_chat/Archive/2016/10#Does it make sense to allow anonymous editing on Wikidata? is relevant. Matěj Suchánek (talk) 11:30, 20 January 2017 (UTC)
Yes, I see that many users oppose disabling anonymous edits, but I wonder how many of those same users patrol recent changes on a regular basis. That is a discussion that Recent Changes Patrollers should be having, but apparently there are none here in WD.--Micru (talk) 12:30, 20 January 2017 (UTC)
There are. And I believe there actually are enough to handle the incoming edits, though of course we would greatly benefit from having more patrollers, or from more patrollers using the actual "patrol" feature, so obviously correct or already reverted edits wouldn't have to be checked by others again. --YMS (talk) 10:47, 21 January 2017 (UTC)
If as you say there would be anyone watching, vandalism wouldn't have crept in so much, to the point that I have been reverted from a legit edit because I used an item whose label had been vandalized in another language, which led the user to think that I was vandalizing myself (!). On many wikis users who spend time watching RC identify themselves with Template:User wikipedia/RC Patrol (Q5654490), this is not the case of Wikidata, so it makes me very doubtful about your claims that anyone is watching at all when there have been reports of vandalism staying for months in important items. At least the first step would be recognizing that we have a problem here, and just brushing it under the carpet with the belief that something is being done (when there is no proof that it is the case), it is not going to help in gaining the trust of the Wikipedias that are already suspicious of the lack of quality of the data that is being allowed into WD. --Micru (talk) 12:12, 21 January 2017 (UTC)
I am not brushing anything under the carpet. I have been calling for help in vandalism patrol myself here and elsewhere several times before. Yes, we need people doing this. But no, it's not that we don't have them, as younare saying. Wearing a badge saying "I'm an RC patroller" doesn't help us, just like no one wearing such badges does not mean in any way that there is nobody taking care of RC. I guess I managed to patrol most of the IP and newbie changes over the last year, and while I've found a lot of vandalism that nobody found for days, weeks ands months, I saw much, much more vandalisn edits already reverted by dozens of fellow users, many of them just as active as I am. --YMS (talk) 13:25, 21 January 2017 (UTC)
Then what is needed is a coordinated effort, as in a RC patrol. There is no use in single users checking vandalism every once in a while on their own, not knowing what has been checked, or what is there to be checked, because it makes the whole process inefficient and full of holes where vandalism just slips away as we are seeing, plus eventually there is the danger that said users get burned out by not having support. If you are already doing the task, and know others that do it as well, what do you think about transitioning into a collaborative effort? For me (and I hope for others too), it would be very useful to be able to refer to a place where to find tools, info about patrolling, etc or other users that can help on a temporary or frequent basis.--Micru (talk) 14:01, 21 January 2017 (UTC)
+1; it was just yesterday that I proposed (on another Wikdiata page) to have a Wikidata:WikiProject CVN in which we can team up, share CVN tools and also make CVN work visible to external Wikidata users such as Wikipedia communities. —MisterSynergy (talk) 14:17, 21 January 2017 (UTC)
Yes, please, go ahead and start it! Perhaps with the full name (Wikidata:WikiProject Countervandalism?), because many people don't know what CVN stands for. I just found out that there is a #cvn-wikidata IRC channel listed on meta.--Micru (talk) 14:45, 21 January 2017 (UTC)
I like the idea of a wikiproject. I would find it useful to have somewhere where people can bring attention to things that they are not sure about or don't have the time/energy to fix. It could also be a good place to document some of the problematic anonymous editors whose IP addresses change a lot. - Nikki (talk) 13:25, 27 January 2017 (UTC)
(Edit conflict) I've compiled a list of tools and links under User:YMS/RC. Otherwise I don't know what to do in terms of collaborative effort. At least for me, I cannot imagine being assigned to shifts or certain areas of work. I check RC multiple times a day and wouldn't change this e.g. if I knew who exactly is active at which exact times. --YMS (talk) 14:23, 21 January 2017 (UTC)
Well at least we need to advertise available tools much more than we do until right now. Your page is great, but I did not know it until yesterday. Something comparable should be available in the Wikidata namespace, as a community project. I would agree, however, that assigned shifts or simliar approaches are not necessary. —MisterSynergy (talk) 14:35, 21 January 2017 (UTC)
(edit conflict)Sharing your tools and links more broadly is already a useful contribution. I don't think anybody would ask you for a deeper commitment that the one you already take. Having a group can encourage other users to participate too.--Micru (talk) 14:45, 21 January 2017 (UTC)
I agree that IP vandalism is a major problem. But I already noted, that (maby suprisingly) most of IP edits are not vandalism, but most of vandalism come form IP and mobile edits. As I noted, in my opinion the solution is to use (semi-)protection much more frequently.--Jklamo (talk) 12:35, 21 January 2017 (UTC)
The amount of vandalism is honestly excessive. MechQuester (talk) 21:41, 23 January 2017 (UTC)
@MechQuester: Where do you see this excessive vandalism? I browse unpatrolled changes or claims or terms (de/en) right now, but I don’t see that much vandalism to be honest. Since I don’t want to rule out that I use wrong filters here, I’d ask here now… Thanks, —MisterSynergy (talk) 08:41, 24 January 2017 (UTC)
I just noticed that an undo doesn't lead to an automatic mark that the edit was patrolled. Is there a reason why this doesn't happen? It seems to me like the system could assume that any edit that get's undone by a person who can mark as patrolled should be marked that way. ChristianKl (talk) 10:17, 24 January 2017 (UTC)
 Support indeed, this makes the patrolling very tedious, because you have to go twice on the same diff, to cancel it, then mark it as read :( --Hsarrazin (talk) 19:50, 25 January 2017 (UTC)
I added a phabricator task (https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T156470) ChristianKl (talk) 10:50, 27 January 2017 (UTC)
I should not have said really excessive. More like, some of the vandalism, doesn't get caught at all. MechQuester (talk) 14:33, 24 January 2017 (UTC)
  • I think it would be good to start a counter-vandalism wikiproject. We could coordinate all tools in one place, have a list of people involved that could be contacted by those looking to volunteer in the area, and maybe work on developing new tools or better using the ones we have for Wikidata-specific vandalism. All good ideas. -- Ajraddatz (talk) 22:02, 30 January 2017 (UTC)
At the Dutch WP we have a feature called RTRC (Real Time Recent Changes). Maybe it could come in handy to apply that also for Wikidata and other big projects like ENWP. Q.Zanden questions? 15:27, 2 February 2017 (UTC)
PS: This is a feature from User:Krinkle and can be added to your common.css by adding this code. Q.Zanden questions? 15:32, 2 February 2017 (UTC)

My test with "local" users show that they can take care of wikidata items and learn fast. The main problem here is the lack of an "inclusive" policy before "exclusive" policy, I guess. On itwikipedia users keep saying that "they are expert on wikidata and vandalism is not a issue there" when this problem emerges, curbing maybe the enthusiasm of many possible good users who could help. But there is some surprisingly long undetected vandalism and the problem emerges quite often asking around.

Still, the core point for me is that this is not just a "nerd game", this is content, you need more real content-focused users from the other platforms. You don't need only efficient tools to let one user to monitor 10000 OS he sometimes knows nothing, you need 100 users that monitor 100 OS they know a lot about. Funny things, they are not even difficult to find with good wikimetrics, but I think a lot of users don't trust this vision.

in any case, a countervandalism project is a good idea. Let's simply try not to focus "exclusively" on tools and shortcut because the strength of an integrated platform is its interconnection and plurality. Than of course those things are always fun.

Talking about shortcuts, I re-propose my suggestions that some class of users can automatically mark a thanked edit as patrolled. Like an option in the preferences to select.--Alexmar983 (talk) 06:57, 9 February 2017 (UTC)

If you want 100 people to monitor 100 changes than we need tools to show every of those 100 people the rights changes that they are well equipped to monitor. That means that it's best when changes in Italian labels and descriptions get shown to people who actually speak Italian. Better Watchlist integration into the Watchlist of Wikipedia would also help.
Of course in addition to new tools it's also important to win new users for Wikidata. I'm not sure that saying: "We want more people who monitor our recent changes" is a good way to win content focused users. Gaining new users is likely a combination of Wikidata providing more value, the value that Wikidata provides becoming more well known (in Wikipedia and in society in general) and new users having a good editing experience.
When creating a new Wikipedia page for a fascia in the human body, I have seen it get deleted because it containted too little information. Editing on Wikidata is often more fun because it's possible to add many small items without having to have a big discussion over the notability at every time. ChristianKl (talk) 11:02, 11 February 2017 (UTC)
ChristianKl actually, you mainly need people to take care about the items they know. When they focus on specific subgroups of items, they do it intensively, so they don't really need to select something. This comes more naturally if they work on a platform that it is strongly integrated with wikidata, so such changes affect their "real articles". The strange thing is that itwikipedia is strongly integrated but sometimes discourage users to enjoy wikidata in a creative way, creating more bottlenecks than necessary IMHO. So I introduced them to wikidata with P18 and now I still receive half a dozens of email and talk messages per month about wikidata in general, which means there is some gap I was clearly filling, no doubt. BTW this is to say that I am "neutral", I don't think all platforms should use intensively wikidata, itwiki for example was "forced" in a quite limited time to become more wikidata-centric and users were sometimes confused. But I totally support they do stuff, but not necessarily the same on every wiki. Talking about less integrated platforms, i think that you have to welcome users sometimes with candy, sometimes just being honest about what is really necessary. But in any case if you show what wikidata can do, than the integration is quite natural. For example many people like wikidata lists, they like image maintanance, they like bot-created articles from wikidata. And they like those things especially where they are new users that see wiki more as a integrated platform, with still a lot of curiosity. They like them "actively". So I guess, the future can be bright, it just need a little bit more of human connection. They come here if you come to them. Listen to what they really need, accept they can teach you something interesting too and you are already more than half a way for a "robust" platform, IMHO.
One thing I have noticed is that we don't give the autopratolled right "manually" anymore, it is not even shown in the SUL summary and it is semiautomatic I guess. IMHO in the early phases (and we are still "young"), granting AP should be a "human contact". Being pinged on the candidature page is good, more importantly you are proposed if you did something more than indirectly connecting items, so there is a growth, an interaction. People are "proud" when they receive It... it would be much better.
And finally, some wikimetrics. On itwiki Nemo bis simply did a test 2-3 years ago with all users that had the biggest amount of patrolled edits, made a lists, and I helped him and conctact them in their talks... like "you have used the undo button many times in the last month, would you like to be a patroller?". it's not automatic, there are many steps, they have to say yes, propose themselves, than we discuss if it is ok, but in the end we got 2-3 new patroller in few weeks, and they were good.
I would try these things before banning IPs. And in any case, can't we just have some preview option like dewiki? On some platform can be discouraging, especially small one (i remember a discussion on meta forum), but we here are very technical so maybe it works fine. We also need some good objective data to think about the possible strategies.--Alexmar983 (talk) 13:49, 11 February 2017 (UTC)
@Alexmar983:Could you list the bottlenecks that you see in a more detailed way?
I agree that a process in which autopatrolled is given by a human would be a step forward. ChristianKl (talk) 17:32, 11 February 2017 (UTC)

Copy reference from one item to the other

Hello. Is there a way to copy reference from one item to one other? Xaris333 (talk) 11:52, 5 February 2017 (UTC)

@Xaris333: Yes, there is a gadget "DuplicateReferences"  — billinghurst sDrewth 12:25, 5 February 2017 (UTC)
@billinghurst: This gadget works only inside an item, not between items (different wikidata pages). Xaris333 (talk) 12:27, 5 February 2017 (UTC)
Yep, I misunderstood your need. I haven't seen a tool like the one you desire.  — billinghurst sDrewth 12:30, 5 February 2017 (UTC)

Anyone? Xaris333 (talk) 21:11, 10 February 2017 (UTC)

Identifying a source but differently

Hoi, we have a lot of identifiers for external sources. They serve a purpose, it is good to have them. Internal to the Wikimedia projects there are projects that identify subjects that are of their interest. These subjects do not fit any known criteria but the interest of their group. One of these groups wants to maintain a list of artists that are "of the African diaspora". Claiming any criteria but the interest of this group is problematic for obvious reasons.

The idea is to identify them all as being part of this Wikimedia project. This can be done in a variety of ways but realistically they just want to identify items as being of interest to them. In effect they will work on the Wikidata items and seek to complement the available data. Their purpose is to query Wikidata and use it as well for work in Wikipedia, Commons ... whatever. The benefit they gain is that Wikidata queries are real time. Update items and the result in queries is different. They only have to add data once and that is it.

My proposal is to allow for identifiers to these projects and treat them as a source. The projects are established projects and they seek to use Wikidata for their purposes and will work towards high quality Wikidata data. I intend to help them with this; there are over 900 items involved and it is an expanding list. My reason for doing this: it gives Wikidata a new purpose. Thanks, GerardM (talk) 10:35, 9 February 2017 (UTC)

Why not do something similar to en-wiki, and add a wiki-project banner template to the item talk page, with code that adds it to a category?
I suppose the difficulty is to combine such category information with eg SPARQL, to limit maintenance queries to their items of interest. But I think Magnus has tools that can do category + query combination, doesn't he? Jheald (talk) 11:00, 9 February 2017 (UTC)
Tracked in Phabricator
Task T157676
Perhaps we could ask the WDQS developers to consider creating a preprocessor SERVICE in queries, that could take a category specification and would replace it with a VALUES list of items? I think that could have some quite general usefulness. Jheald (talk) 11:08, 9 February 2017 (UTC)
I created a Phabricator ticket for the suggestion. Jheald (talk) 12:46, 9 February 2017 (UTC)
We have imported from Wikimedia project (P143)...? Gerard, I'm not sure what you mean by "Identifiers". Are they properties or items or something else? Deryck Chan (talk) 11:19, 9 February 2017 (UTC)
  • Not in favour of any item labelling for particular work. Each group has to use the common statements and perform some multi-criteria queries to extract items of interest. If we start to allow groups to tag items for particular purpose, we are dead. People have to learn how to use queries to extract the data they want instead of putting personal identifiers on items they want to improve, that's the way a database is used. Snipre (talk) 12:19, 9 February 2017 (UTC)
  • I tend to agree with Snipre. In most of the wikiprojects information.... data can be queried and lists obtained. This is exactly why a database like Wikidata is for. It does not make much sense creating properties such as P9999 ("related to wikiproject X") -> "Wikiproject:French literature" (if that is what GerardM meant, I did not understand the "identifiers" (?) and "sources" (?) part) when they should be able to identify these articles through standard queries ("writers writing in French" or "books written in French" or "french critics studying a "subclass of" or "facet of" French literature"...). Yes, storing data on "skin colour" is more troublesome, but... a property such as this would be a way to circumvent that 'troublesomeness' through "wikiproject common sense"/"personal tagging". This is just another way to say "John Doe is somehow pretty dark skinned or mulatto or ... and he does not live in Africa" not using a so called "skincolour property". Are there many examples of Wikiprojects in which querying lists is not easy? Or are they a minority? Strakhov (talk) 13:05, 9 February 2017 (UTC)
Obviously. It is important to include statements to the best effect. What you deny is that not all the content can be cleanly defined by statements and found by queries. When you have a random amount of data, an identifier that works like a source statement can be ignored for practical purposes but it allows people to do their project work. So YES, we want their statements and the point is that they WILL update the data because they use queries to determine how they are doing. So EXACTLY by allowing identifying a random grouping you will see that the quality for these items will be highly improved. Thanks, GerardM (talk) 14:29, 9 February 2017 (UTC)
If I understand what GerardM is proposing, I still don't see any purpose in "identifiers" for this - why not propose a property "of interest to" which would be set to an item for the wikiproject or other representation of the group of interest. ArthurPSmith (talk) 17:22, 9 February 2017 (UTC)
Because it is of little interest to most people to whom it is interesting. It is as interesting as knowing what other sources have information about the same subject. Not. But it makes it possible to do the nifty things that query enable. Thanks, GerardM (talk) 18:33, 9 February 2017 (UTC)
  • As far as I understand the problem is that the group is interested in people of the African diaspora but we don't have a property that says which people belong to the African diaspora. Additional the group also doesn't have a separate website that could be referenced with an external ID.
In theory, I'm interested in making it easy for groups to cooperate with Wikidata, in this case, I'm however doubtful. If we had a property "related to Wikiproject:African Diaspora" we would likely get a lot of unsourced claims that suggest that certain people are part of that Wikiproject and thus part of the African Diaspora. Given that information about race is sensitive personal data this seems problematic to me. ChristianKl (talk) 22:04, 10 February 2017 (UTC)
It is a list that matters to them. Exactly because race is sensitive I tend to ignore it. This way of working helps because it is for them to decide who is included and who is not. Our gain is that they maintain the associated items so they can query Wikidata. Thanks, GerardM (talk) 08:24, 11 February 2017 (UTC)
Do you want to maintain items to query them later in another context, or do you want to query items solely for maintenance purposes? In both cases you could manually set up a list of items in scope of this project and provide links for convenient access. It should even be possible to create a specialized tool at Tool Labs with something like a project-wide watchlist. This would be a little more complex to set up than a direct solution with a claim in the affected items, but it allows us to continue separation of internal and external identifiers. —MisterSynergy (talk) 08:45, 11 February 2017 (UTC)
It's problematic if some institution can decide who counts as African diaspora in a way that they can mark it inside Wikidata without any checks. When Wikidata hosts the list it becomes responsible for it. Especially when it hosts it as the primary venue and we do more than hosting an external ID to another database. ChristianKl (talk) 10:22, 11 February 2017 (UTC)

Module:Wikidata updated

Hello! I have just updated our local Module:Wikidata, so project pages embedding Wikidata content (eg. those with many {{Q}} templates) now load faster and use less memory. Previously, even for simple label lookups, the whole item had to be loaded to memory. If you are curious, the memory usage on Property talk:P131 almost halved and the loading time also went down a bit. I did my best to make the change only internal, the output shouldn't have changed. If you see some problems, please report them. I believe this change has broken previous limits and made showcasing content on Wikidata easier and more friendly. Matěj Suchánek (talk) 21:36, 10 February 2017 (UTC)

@Matěj Suchánek: I am presuming (though just checking) that it is recommended for the sister wikis to update to this updated version — well those that have not further customised theirs?  — billinghurst sDrewth 11:20, 11 February 2017 (UTC)
As a note, if we are updating these base modules, it would be great if we can consider ensuring that the update is propagated through the wikis. If nothing else it should be in the weekly newsletter, though ultimately I would love to see an opt-in processes for the wikis to have updates pushed out by a bot.  — billinghurst sDrewth 11:23, 11 February 2017 (UTC)
I was going to add it to the newsletter but forgot it. Updating by a bot sounds interesting though some wikis may use a slightly modified version which the bot would overwrite. Matěj Suchánek (talk) 11:42, 11 February 2017 (UTC)
@Matěj Suchánek: which is why I suggest an opt-in approach, or guided opt-out. 1) it encourages minor improvements can be written into the master; 2) we have a true master; 3) the small wikis are better supported, especially as they struggle the most for numbers, knowledge and skill 4) we could hang off something similar @Yurik: is exploring for mw:Template:Graph series. As an aside have we ever analysed how many wikis have the modules, and their level of currency?  — billinghurst sDrewth 12:40, 11 February 2017 (UTC)
I believe there shouldn't be any problems. I have already noticed a small regression that looking up labels from redirect items doesn't work but it shouldn't be problem on clients. Matěj Suchánek (talk) 11:42, 11 February 2017 (UTC)
On svwiki we have a Module, that has been developed locally. That module has migrated far from the one you use on other projects. That does not prevent us from having a second module, that could be bot-updated regularly. @Larske, Ainali: mfl. -- Innocent bystander (talk) 13:23, 11 February 2017 (UTC)

Question. Procedure

You see a user adding systematically wikipedia urls (such as, for example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leslie_Orgel) in reference URL (P854), sourcing statements that way, in a manual fashion. What would you say to him/her?

  • 1) Nothing. Pass.
  • 2) Stop, at the very least you should add a stable link such as https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Leslie_Orgel&oldid=761201288
  • 3) Stop, you should not use reference URL (P854) but imported from Wikimedia project (P143)
  • 4) Don't waste your time adding references 'manually' to wikipedias because their value is next to zero.

I think 1) and 2) are not ok, since it makes more difficult the re-use of data in wikipedias, but I'd like a second opinion. Strakhov (talk) 23:20, 10 February 2017 (UTC)

Just my two cents here, but I think 3) is the best option, provided that it is conveyed in a very courteous and good-willed manner. imported from Wikimedia project (P143) is the way to go transferring information from Wikipedia, in my understanding. The recent Wikidata intro talk streamed by Wikimedia on YouTube discussed this topic, suggesting a method of referencing akin to 3). The rationale was that Wikipedia is a great source, but just like Wikipedia can't cite itself, Wikidata can't cite Wikipedia. With all that being said, the user is moving in the right direction and almost certainly acting in good faith, since they are adding references, just with the wrong property. Icebob99 (talk) 04:31, 11 February 2017 (UTC)
Thanks for the feedback! :) Strakhov (talk) 13:24, 11 February 2017 (UTC)

WikiCite 2017 applications open through February 27

We just announced that applications for WikiCite 2017 (Vienna 23-25 May, 2017) are open until February 27, 2017. WikiCite 2017 is a 3-day conference, summit and hack day to be hosted in Vienna, Austria, on May 23-25, 2017. It expands efforts started last year with WikiCite 2016 to design a central bibliographic repository , as well as tools and strategies to improve information quality and verifiability in Wikimedia projects. Our goal is to bring together Wikimedia contributors, data modelers, information and library science experts, software engineers, designers and academic researchers who have experience working with citations and bibliographic data in Wikipedia, Wikidata and other Wikimedia projects. For this initiative to be successful, it is critical to get members from the core Wikidata community involved, and it would be fantastic to see you in Vienna. Thanks to generous funding from a number of organizations, we have (limited) travel funding available, if you're interested in participating please consider submitting an application. This year's event will be held at the same venue as the Wikimedia Hackathon and we'll be able to accommodate up to 100 participants. Any questions? Get in touch with the organizers at: wikicite@wikimedia.org --DarTar (talk) 18:31, 11 February 2017 (UTC)

Lost paintings

How should lost paintings listed? They appear here: Wikidata:WikiProject sum of all paintings/Missing collection; but when there are destroyed they will never have a collection. --Carl Ha (talk) 07:35, 10 February 2017 (UTC)

How about using "unknown value"? ChristianKl (talk) 09:10, 10 February 2017 (UTC)
"Unknown" would fit for paintings which disappeared (e.g. stolen), if they are destroyed better use "no value". Ahoerstemeier (talk) 10:20, 10 February 2017 (UTC)
And in cases where we know when and where an artwork was destroyed? Last known collection with an end-date? --HHill (talk) 14:39, 10 February 2017 (UTC)
I would add end time (P582) on the item level with the date the artwork was destroyed. ChristianKl (talk) 15:19, 10 February 2017 (UTC)
And for now lost manuscripts, which once had a shelfmark in a collection I would still add that information, as that is the identifier they are still cited by (cf. e. g. the manuscripts from the municipal library in Strasbourg destroyed in 1870). --HHill (talk) 15:40, 10 February 2017 (UTC)
lost artwork (Q4140840) or destroyed artwork (Q21745157)? Andreasm háblame / just talk to me 04:23, 12 February 2017 (UTC)
@Carl Ha: Wikidata:WikiProject sum of all paintings/Missing collection has all paintings that don't have collection (P195) set. That doesn't have to be now, but can also be in the history. You just have to qualify it with start time (P580) / end time (P582) / point in time (P585). We aim to have full provenance, so every collection since the painting was made. You can use significant event (P793) to model things like a theft or destruction. Please have a look at Wikidata:WikiProject Visual arts/Item structure for more information about how to model artworks. Multichill (talk) 17:17, 12 February 2017 (UTC)

Stop everything!

This summit has both a Peakbagger mountain ID (P3109) and a peakware mountain ID (P3513). You can help lesser known peaks get their owns.

Hello. Please consider stopping everything you are doing right now and joining the ongoing effort to enhance our coverage of mountain (Q8502) in our database! peakbagger.com (Q28736250) has just donated 67,591 IDs that I have immediately uploaded into Mix'n'match (Q28054658). The result is this page, where you can help deploy the IDs on our items dedicated to summits through Peakbagger mountain ID (P3109). There is also, by the way, a new catalog for the much smaller Peakware (Q28493740) database, that you can use here to import data through our new peakware mountain ID (P3513). All this will lead to actual improvements on Wikipedias, as templates such as Template:Geographical links (Q28528875), that automatically display the external links on articles, are currently being adopted quite seriously, at least on the French version. So yes, please, stop everything and come to the mountains, where you'll reach a higher perspective on Wikidata! Thierry Caro (talk) 08:28, 11 February 2017 (UTC)

I did a few, but it will take a lot of time ... How was the automatic matching done? Did peakbagger donate the coordinates corresponding to the IDs? It would be possible to match a lot faster by mapping all this data.Koxinga (talk) 18:15, 11 February 2017 (UTC)
I'd agree - this would be much easier to work with if the summary data in mix-and-match had coordinates, or the country it's in, or something similar. You're going to get a lot of well-meaning mismatches otherwise - there's 19 Brown Mountains, 13 Smith Mountains, etc. Is it possible to extract this from the DB and update the entries in mix-and-match? Andrew Gray (talk) 17:37, 12 February 2017 (UTC)
It's still much much faster than without any catalog to work with. But it may be worth it to ask for more data~, as you said. Let me come back to you. Thierry Caro (talk) 17:56, 12 February 2017 (UTC)

Dealing with property deletion

Popularity of Wikidata is rising. Thanks to User:Ivan A. Krestinin now we regularly updated {{ExternalUse}} on properties talkpages, so it is possible to see extent of popularity of some properties, for some of them the popularity is overwhelming, they are being used in hundreds of templates in tens of projects. But to maintain good reputation of Wikidata the stability is necessary.

On the other hand we have Wikidata:Properties for deletion process (and too much easy property creation). Right now there are multiple properties listed, that are used in tens of templates and tens of projects. While after deletion data are usually migrated (Wikidata internally) the relation to the templates using these properties in local projects is not in my opinion adequately treated. There is only rule "Validate the property isn't being used in other projects (using {{ExternalUse}}) and if it is, leave a message in Village pump of the project." but even this rule is not adequately enforced (and even {{ExternalUse}} was not updated). A prime example is sibling (P3373) creation and P7 (P7) and P9 (P9) deletion - these properties were deleted two months ago but as of today both deleted properties are still used in 10+ local templates. That is not good for Wikidata reputation.

Firstly I do not think that leaving message at Village pumps is sufficient. For some smaller projects (and yes, Wikidata are also popular on smaller projects) there is simply not enough of workforce for constant updating of templates using Wikidata. And for Wikidata opponents in local projects necessity of handling these changes locally is a strong argument to not implement Wikidata at all.

But even if there is consensus that leaving message at Village pumps is sufficient, that rule needs to be unconditionally enforced and it would be appropriate at least to set rule for deletion properties after some period of time (at least one week) after notification.--Jklamo (talk) 23:23, 9 February 2017 (UTC)

I am sorry, but {{ExternalUse}} is not a sufficient method to see if and where a property is used in the clients. Some of our templates on svwiki can see the presence of a property, look into the statements of that property and sometimes adapt itself to that, without beforehand being programmed to handle that specific property. No bot or user can therefor easily see which Properties are EsternalUsed on svwiki. -- Innocent bystander (talk) 08:38, 10 February 2017 (UTC)
{{ExternalUse}} itself is doing absolutely nothing. At the moment Ivan's bot is doing all updates and he is fortunately willing to improve his script to capture more usage (feel free to report at User talk:Ivan A. Krestinin#KrBot_.7B.7BExternalUse.7D.7D). I am bit surprised that none of WMDE developers is taking care of this (to be sure pinging @Lea Lacroix (WMDE): to correct me if I am wrong). But imperfection of the {{ExternalUse}} updating script is even stronger argument that properties deletions should not be treated as they are at the moment.--Jklamo (talk) 10:41, 10 February 2017 (UTC)
Jklamo: What specifically do you expect? We currently don't have the necessary data in the database to be able to tell which specific property is used in a given article. There is some work towards changing that but it is not high priority. Also keep in mind that we will never have a list of uses that is anywhere near complete. Wikidata's data is used outside of Wikimedia and this usage will only increase. There is no way for us to track this automatically. --Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) (talk) 14:42, 13 February 2017 (UTC)
By the help of Lsjbot we have some kind of Wikidata-connection in the majority of our pages on svwiki. And svwiki has > 3 million articles. In many cases, the presence of any property is screened and used to affect the content, at least in some maintenance-categories. You could therefor add some of our templates in all ExternalUse-templates. And most of our properties with Externa id datatype can be recognised by most of our Wikidata-supported templates. Some of these properties are maybe not in use anywhere yet, but our templates already support them. I know to little about js to know how the adding of templates by js affects the wiki, but I guess that is also something to take account for. -- Innocent bystander (talk) 18:08, 10 February 2017 (UTC)

Quality of image (P18) and possible new tools

Now that my long work about local users and image tools has reached a mature phase after 13 months i would like to start a series of public discussion. I explain later why this one specifically now. Sorry, it is a long one.

So the main reason why I did that was because of "quality". As I discussed with other users privately and also on Manske's blog (I forgot to read his last reply last summer), a "100% nerd" approach is fine but it is not everything, we need some "pluralism" here. 100 "local" or "non-nerd" or "content-focused" users can take care of only maybe 100 items, but they take care very well. Even if it takes more time to do, the overall image quality is improving for sure. Their work is different than a users that plays with tools and do 10000 P18 all alone. it's prcatical sense, you can't know everything very well, so you decide if it is the quantity or the quality the main "issue". In the case of P18 a user that knows the territory can find or at least know that it is possible to have a much better image, while someone working behind a keyboard crunching data find efficiently maybe just one image, which might not be "optimal". As I said, pluralism. We need both types of users here. For one user profile wikidata is a tool, for the other profile is more of a goal. They can live together in the end.

For example if I have only one low-resolution picture from 2007 with coordinates, the user processing thousands of requests usually insert it. The user that live in the area instead realizes that he can go and shot a much better one for wikidata item and the local wikipedia article too. Another example I always do: you have for a hamlet only the image of a house or a church. The "keyboard-oriented" user might think it is good enough, the local user maybe knows that a nice picture of the whole hamlet is possible or more informative and does not insert it immediately. That red spot on wikishootme is actually useful for him and the quality of our platform the way it is.

Why I am talking about this now? Because yesterday thanks to User:Slaunger Wikishootme arrived at commons:Commons talk:Valued image candidates/candidate list. Very good, but this means that quality is more and more emerging as a key vector of the P18 maintenance activity. As I was "expecting", more or less.

I therefore left there a first comment about the "red dots" and how they might be false negatives (and basically how they can ignore that and use it in any case). I didn't talk yet about "green dots" on the wikishootme map and how from a quality-oriented point of view they might be "false positive". I think we should start to discuss about this here.

So, over these months talking around I was thinking about two tools to be tested also by "local"/"content-oriented"/"not-so-nerd" users that might help in this direction.

The first idea is a regularly updated list of images that are used on more than one geographic items here on wikidata (it can be every item of course, but I want to display them on a map). For example if the items of the hamlet, the main square of the hamlet and the church in the hamlet are all green but use the same image, that means some of them can be re-uploaded for sure.

The second tool I'd like to have and show around is a list of P18 (again I want to see them on a map, but it can be every item) that have low size. I am quite sure that almost every P18 image less than 300kb in size, can be improved. Even if the picture is good is probably an old one, so a recent one is not a bad idea.

Do you think it is possible to have these tools? At least to include one of these features in existing tools?

Again, we have a very strange "fragmented" situation here regarding P18. In some area like USA we still need tool to process a lot of work, but in other countries like Italy (especially in some regions) we start to need more refined tools. I know it is difficult to play both strategy, but that's actually what is necessary. The more we produce different or multi-faceted tools, the easy is for users from different backgrounds to improve P18, and this reduces our global backlog in any case.

Comments?--Alexmar983 (talk) 05:38, 10 February 2017 (UTC)

@Alexmar983: So what you're looking for, for the first one, is a query something like this: tinyurl.com/gsrale3 ?
This is finding populated places in Italy, with an image (P18), that is also being used for a different item, where that other item is not a disambiguation item. Showing the first 100 results.
(We seem to have lots of images used on disambiguation items, which should presumably all be removed; but they're not really the case you were interested in).
The query could be easily altered to limit to places within a radius of a particular point; and/or to show map coordinates. Probably somebody could build a tool round it, or embed such a query in WikiShootMe, but that I know less about. Jheald (talk) 10:56, 10 February 2017 (UTC)
Jheald what you're saying is part of what we need, so it's good. I've also to learn to use these tinyurls. I am also showing P18 queries to users after WSM, WNP and WDFIST, so I guess we can use a query. So that's good, I can start to show this around. Some users can change line 6 and focus on their area. That's the right direction. I asked for a tool just because they are more "plug and play": all of the users I have contacted have used wikishootme, less than 10-20% have started to study how to make and use queries. But as long as someone can start to do "something" I am happy in any case.--Alexmar983 (talk) 11:05, 10 February 2017 (UTC)
@Alexmar983: In case it helps, here's the same query with a map display:
  • tinyurl.com/hddqzww (all Italy); and
  • tinyurl.com/zg82ehc limited to places within 20km of Florence.
(which may be more complete than filtering for a particular region -- for the UK at least, the located in the administrative territorial entity (P131) chain can be a bit incomplete or under-specific, particularly at the most local level).
In each case clicking on the red dot brings up a picture and the links to the item. Or switch to the image grid display for the previous view. (The WQDS developers are amazing).
Hope this helps! Jheald (talk) 12:07, 10 February 2017 (UTC)
Perfect, Jheald I can start to spam the first map in some talks. This should be a good catalyst for the collection of new images where they might be more "needed". --Alexmar983 (talk) 12:11, 10 February 2017 (UTC)
On the other hand Alexmar983, looking at the images being for populated places near Florence that are not images of things with their own items, are they typically that much better (or indeed any better) ?
  • tinyurl.com/ztwgu4m - image grid of images that are identified with another item
  • tinyurl.com/hap4x7o - image grid of images that are not identified with another item
  • tinyurl.com/htjpwuv - both plotted on the same map
Perhaps the conclusion is to assume that almost all 'populated places' (as opposed to famous buildings) are probably in need of a better image
Or, alternatively, that a signature building may not be the worst image to represent a populated place. (If one could only have one image of Paris, would be the Eiffel Tower be such a bad pick?)
Interested to know what you think. Jheald (talk) 23:18, 10 February 2017 (UTC)
Jheald I don't think that the maps with same images show the only images who should be improved. Actually you have not make a map yet with all the items with close coordinates and same pictures where you can also find for example an item in a small museum displayed as a whole picture for the museum, a picture of two buildings used for both, a church in a park used for both the church and the park and so on. I am not saying that they are all bad, I simply want a tool that focus on an area of work where an improvement is statistically possible. It's the local user that i am sure has all the information to know what to do with his/her current resources and knowledge and motivation. In the end it does not matter for the wikidata workflow if in many case if we have an image or another (they end in some lists when they are small, they are used in some bot-created articles where they can be replaced later if necessary), but it is important for those users to "play" with wikidata and think about new ways to improve their work. Of course we can detect only the same image but not similar images but they are very focused in their area and they can go on with the manual work and change in any case when possible or necessary. The WSM tools and similar were a way to introduce the problem of missing images, but they obviously did not stop there. Users already started to take more pictures based on their experience from WSM. They know that if a hamlet has a article about the place itself a church, the town hall, the WWI memorial and the main square, and another one only an article about the place, when they visit the second hamlet with less articles they collect pictures for such future articles in any case. I expect this map (tool( to work the same way. For example there is a diffusion of drones, recently, maybe one day of the user I know or a chapter will buy one, and they will be ready to know where to use it more efficiently. They are very reactive, once they start they often find new ways to improve and reuse tools information.--Alexmar983 (talk) 04:01, 11 February 2017 (UTC)

Take this other example: here a very common picture was updated using WSM. The problem is that this picture is few kb in size. In this case we can find better images in the category, probably, but in the case of a very isolated village that old picture could be the only one so far. That's why a list of P18 images by size is very interesting to have once in a while. I was hoping that we could upload the information from commons and put a mark on WSM map every time the displayed image is "small" (for example in green-yellow instead of green, or a different icon size for image displayed). As an advanced functionality for more expert users. If I am walking around this could tell me all the area where new pictures should be probably taken. Of course, it is possible that a better image already exist on commons without coordinates, but a duplicate is not a problem. Not taking a good high resolution picture when I am there just because I don't know it could be useful, that is a waste of time.--Alexmar983 (talk) 11:56, 10 February 2017 (UTC)

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T157798
At the moment there is no way to access image size information from within SPARQL queries (so I've just put in this ticket to see if it could be made possible); but if you use a query to generate a list of items/locations/images that you're interested in, then it should be possible for an external script to get the image sizes from Commons. Jheald (talk) 13:29, 10 February 2017 (UTC)
I can still make (or have) a map once in a while and ask my current list of "local users" to check it. I don't expect this option to be available to a lot of users, but mainly to those who show great interest to combine their content-related activity with tools. For events such as photo-excursion of wikimedians is also ok. We could spot the worst area and go specifically there for a gathering.--Alexmar983 (talk) 13:43, 10 February 2017 (UTC)
  • One report I'd love to see - I don't anything exists at the moment - is "items with image (P18) and Commons category (P373), where there is a featured/valued/quality image in the category (or subcategories), but it's not the one listed as P18". This might be a good way to help make sure we get the better images on the items rather than the low-quality ones. Andrew Gray (talk) 13:15, 10 February 2017 (UTC)
Andrew Gray good! I should have though about that too. But this is more a way to fix something that we have. I like to focus on improving what we don't have. Once we have it, fixing it is always just a click (so, that's again more the "nerd game"). But for example for a good photo competition, improving "non qualified" P18 images would be an excellent (and clear) target.--Alexmar983 (talk) 13:21, 10 February 2017 (UTC)

Is it also posisble to have on a map the items with P18 but no P373 and with P373 but no P18? They all indicates potential lack of equilibrium, at least in the areas where local users regularly update wikidata properties, in the first case it is possible that we only have one image and so a global lack of coverage of many details (for example, I have the facade of a church but not a shot of the interior). In the second case it is possible that noone of the images in the category are good. it is thererefore important to fill the gap of a good image before some less expert users update a not-totally-correct P18.--Alexmar983 (talk) 17:05, 10 February 2017 (UTC)

Sure, Alexmar983:
  • tinyurl.com/gqtzca8 items with P18 but no P373 within 20km of Florence
  • tinyurl.com/jyg2sps items with P373 but no P18
Lots of red dots in the first group -- possible that P373 simply hasn't been added; or that there may only be one image (or somebody thought too few to make a category - which could perhaps be re-thought). Jheald (talk) 17:55, 10 February 2017 (UTC)
  • tinyurl.com/j2k95u2 update on that first query -- now includes a usable link to the Commons file page, rather than just the image. It's a shame it's not possible to then automatically look up the categories on the image, and see if any of them are "unclaimed" by any existing P373 and might match -- this is where it really would be good to have better integration between SPARQL and the category system, particularly on Commons. Jheald (talk) 18:12, 10 February 2017 (UTC)
Florence has many tourist photos and a user that work a lot on commons (the 2nd uploader in the world) but does not "like" wikidata so it is not the best example in my experience, it has strange dynamics. I suspect it is also difficult for me to find local users there because they're sometimes afraid by the backlog. In any case the biggest part of the users I contact have some expertise on commons and I am sure can take care of creating missing categories. I have already suggested this when I explain to them P373, but I never pushed too much in that direction. If they are motivated they do it themselves. That's why I wanted this type of maps, they are usually more motivated when you can give them a "map". Again, it is much more "natural" and "fast" when a user that knows the territory does these things. I would have never "forced" this work to people that do generic maintenance, it takes 2-3 times more time and you make more mistakes. Local users are perfect for this slow quality improvement. And we can refine together better tools for future countries, because they provide interesting feedbacks.--Alexmar983 (talk) 04:11, 11 February 2017 (UTC)
@Alexmar983: You might like to try experimenting with putting c:Template:Category contains on the top of a few Commons categories of interest (away from Florence) if you like, and see if the reports that that produces would be useful. (See this introductory discussion proposing it at Commons Village Pump.) Not internationalised at all yet -- but I am sure that will follow, if Commons likes it. Jheald (talk) 11:35, 13 February 2017 (UTC)

Snapshot of Wikidata at past times

Hi, out of curiosity, is it possible to run a query on a past snapshot of all the information held in Wikidata at some past time, say on 1 January 2015? It would be interesting to see how the comprehensiveness of certain queries has improved as Wikidata as grown. Icebob99 (talk) 04:35, 11 February 2017 (UTC)

You can find archived dumps in archive.org. Then you would have to parse these dumps to find the data you want. Koxinga (talk) 11:32, 11 February 2017 (UTC)
Thanks! That's pretty handy! Icebob99 (talk) 14:38, 13 February 2017 (UTC)

Problems with searches involving subclass trees

One of the big challenges for the Structured Data for Commons project is going to be trying to understand the information stored in categories and seeing whether the structured data can reproduce it.

As I posted a couple of weeks ago, we can now identify article-like items here for about 1.2 million Commons categories -- but that is about 5.5 million categories there in total, (and the number being created is rising faster than they are being linked).

One issue is complex intersection categories, which for the most part we don't (and won't) want to make a corresponding item for here. But because they are not marked as such, it's hard to know even how many there are.

So I made an experimental template c:Template:Category contains, that could store the specification for one of these complex intersections, in a similar way to that used for is a list of (P360) here, which eg Reasonator can use to make a list of what it thinks should be on the list [5]. As a sweetener to try to encourage use, I added a similar query on the template to the Reasonator one.

But ... most of the queries are timing out, which isn't a very good advertisement.

Curiously, a broader query, or one with more returns, isn't necessarily more likely to time out:

So the following, for c:Category:Grade I listed buildings in Bedfordshire works: 

SELECT DISTINCT ?item ?itemLabel WHERE {
    ?item wdt:P31?/wdt:P279* wd:Q41176 ; 
          wdt:P131+ wd:Q23143 ; 
          wdt:P1435 wd:Q15700818 . 
    SERVICE wikibase:label { bd:serviceParam wikibase:language "en" . }
}
Try it!

As does this, for c:Category:Grade I listed houses in Bedfordshire (and is quick) 

SELECT DISTINCT ?item ?itemLabel WHERE {
    ?item wdt:P31?/wdt:P279* wd:Q3947 ; 
          wdt:P131+ wd:Q23143 ; 
          wdt:P1435 wd:Q15700818 . 
    SERVICE wikibase:label { bd:serviceParam wikibase:language "en" . }
}
Try it!

But this, for c:Category:Grade I listed churches in Bedfordshire, fails -- despite the fact that every church is a sort of building 

SELECT DISTINCT ?item ?itemLabel WHERE {
    ?item wdt:P31?/wdt:P279* wd:Q16970 ; 
          wdt:P131+ wd:Q23143 ; 
          wdt:P1435 wd:Q15700818 . 
    SERVICE wikibase:label { bd:serviceParam wikibase:language "en" . }
}
Try it!

And so does this, for c:Category:Grade I listed bridges in Bedfordshire -- despite the fact that there may only be one 

SELECT DISTINCT ?item ?itemLabel WHERE {
    ?item wdt:P31?/wdt:P279* wd:Q12280 ; 
          wdt:P131+ wd:Q23143 ; 
          wdt:P1435 wd:Q15700818 . 
    SERVICE wikibase:label { bd:serviceParam wikibase:language "en" . }
}
Try it!

Presumably, something is going wrong with the optimising of the query. But what is it that is different about the classes building (Q41176) and house (Q3947) that means they work (and for the second one the query is quick), rather than church building (Q16970) and bridge (Q12280) which don't ?

User:Magnus Manske's WDQ never seemed to have this problem. Jheald (talk) 19:08, 11 February 2017 (UTC)

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T116298
Here's a similar issue, reported on Phabricator in October 2015. That query is still failing too.
The ability to do this kind of search is fundamental: given how we store things, we have to be able to look down the trees.
Has anyone come up with optimisation directives for these sorts of queries on WDQS that work? Jheald (talk) 20:10, 11 February 2017 (UTC)
The way you approach the category system of Commons is problematic. The Commons category system IS problematic. I do not use it because it is not functional for me. I am not looking for multiples; I am looking for a picture of a Frisian horse.. Not Frisian horses (probably the name of the category). What we need is for the structure to be similar to the structure of Wikidata because it does not have the "optimisations" of the Commons categories. When you want to understand the categories, key is to understand that for some categories the data can be easily linked for others the system is the problem we want to solve. Thanks, GerardM (talk) 07:22, 12 February 2017 (UTC)
It's a problem with the query optimizer. Switching the query optimizer off and putting the more selective lines higher up, the queries don't time out:
SELECT DISTINCT ?item ?itemLabel WHERE {
    hint:Query hint:optimizer "None" .
    ?item wdt:P131+ wd:Q23143 ; 
          wdt:P1435 wd:Q15700818 ;
          wdt:P31?/wdt:P279* wd:Q12280 .
    SERVICE wikibase:label { bd:serviceParam wikibase:language "en" . }
}
Try it! 
SELECT DISTINCT ?item ?itemLabel WHERE {
    hint:Query hint:optimizer "None" .
    ?item wdt:P131+ wd:Q23143 ; 
          wdt:P1435 wd:Q15700818;
          wdt:P31?/wdt:P279* wd:Q16970 .
    SERVICE wikibase:label { bd:serviceParam wikibase:language "en" . }
}
Try it!
--Pasleim (talk) 21:14, 12 February 2017 (UTC)
Thanks @Pasleim:, that works. I've updated my template and the arguments for my four test cases on Commons.
So if were getting a bot to automatically translate is a list of (P360)-type specifications into query-text fragments for Commons, are there rules of thumb that we can come up with for how to order the statements? Or is the most important thing just to put wdt:P31?/wdt:P279* last? Jheald (talk) 21:37, 12 February 2017 (UTC)
The experimental Commons template using these searches now presented at Commons Village Pump, here. (Scroll down to section "Other categories"). Jheald (talk) 11:40, 13 February 2017 (UTC)

Daily sectioning of this page?

Would it be a good idea to have automatically-added daily section headers on this page, like c:Commons:Village Pump ? I think it would make it a bit more readable/navigable. Jheald (talk) 15:00, 12 February 2017 (UTC)

+1 good idea —MisterSynergy (talk) 17:08, 12 February 2017 (UTC)
-1 bad idea. I doubt it makes this page more readable, but creates an extra burden to the user who has a query problem. --Succu (talk) 21:27, 12 February 2017 (UTC)
@Succu: What extra burden? On Commons VP the daily header gets added automatically by a bot, just after midnight. The user starting a new section then starts a new section in just the way they do now. Jheald (talk) 21:31, 12 February 2017 (UTC)
The question is topic related and not to the day. I think bot actions like this do not help an inexperienced user to feel welcomed. --Succu (talk) 21:37, 12 February 2017 (UTC)
Fair enough. But I have to say that on Commons VP I do find that the division of the page into a number of sections (even if arbitrary ones), each with only a handful of items in them, does (at least to me) make me feel the page more accessible and welcoming, compared to an undifferentiated wall of 40 or 50 topics here. Jheald (talk) 22:28, 12 February 2017 (UTC)
I do not see a dividing „wall“, only a matter of perspective. And Í doubt this project (aka Wikidata) should take it's inspiration from unstructured Commons. Sorry --Succu (talk) 22:39, 12 February 2017 (UTC)
It does put whitespace into a ToC and make it more readable, though I have always found the day subdivision quirky. Inspiration should come from wherever there is inspiration. Commons or not is irrespective.  — billinghurst sDrewth 22:43, 12 February 2017 (UTC)
So „quirky” is not enough? --Succu (talk) 22:51, 12 February 2017 (UTC)
(don't shoot the messenger) I was just commenting that to me it gives readability to the ToC. I am neither for nor against. Unnice to have to defend an opinion here! FWIW I usually scan this page by watchlist edit summary.  — billinghurst sDrewth 23:09, 12 February 2017 (UTC)
I also doubt it makes this page more readable and it makes Toc unnecessary longer. --Jklamo (talk) 01:11, 13 February 2017 (UTC)
I have seen some project doing it... awful to me (sorry to say that this way). Matěj Suchánek (talk) 14:28, 13 February 2017 (UTC)

Editing Wikidata descriptions from Wikipedia app (beta)

Hello folks,

As you may know, the descriptions from Wikidata are displayed on several Wikipedias, for example on the mobile version (web) or the mobile apps.

The Reading team of WMF is now experimenting allowing editing these descriptions from the Android Wikipedia app in hebrew, russian and catalan. This feature has been deployed in the beta version of the app last week, and will be deployed on the production version for these three languages within the next few weeks.

Given the small size of the beta app userbase, we anticipate few Wikidata edits per day from this first rollout. The user base on the production (non-beta) version of the app is roughly 20 times the size of the beta. However, we appologize for the late announcement. If you see anything funny going on or have any concerns, please reach out the team at reading@wikimedia.org. Thanks!

Documentation:

Lea Lacroix (WMDE) (talk) 16:16, 13 February 2017 (UTC)

Merge request: Norra Vallgatan (Q28800048) and Norra Vallgatan (Q17501997)

Can someone please merge: Norra Vallgatan (Q28800048) and Norra Vallgatan (Q17501997)? //Mippzon (talk) 22:18, 18 February 2017 (UTC)

This section was archived on a request by: Matěj Suchánek (talk) 09:15, 19 February 2017 (UTC)

Which property to use for the candidate number?

Sorry to spam with the same question:

Is there already a property that is suited to express the election candidate's number or is a new one needed? I would like to propose one if no existing one fits the job. – Susanna Ånäs (Susannaanas) (talk) 15:18, 9 February 2017 (UTC)

What is a candidate number? Is it merely the position on the ballot paper, in which case series ordinal (P1545) might do? Or is it a number given by some central authority, in which case a specific property is probably a good idea. Jheald (talk) 16:29, 9 February 2017 (UTC)
I did propose a candidate number. series ordinal (P1545) was what I thought to use alternatively. The current proposal accepts not only digits but literals as well. One might come up with a more generic name, an option id or similar. series ordinal (P1545) is an ok fallback option for my acute needs. – Susanna Ånäs (Susannaanas) (talk) 20:45, 13 February 2017 (UTC)

Years prior to Gregorian calendar, why is Gregorian then default there?

I am wondering that with the smarts that we now have for dates, that when a year entered is prior to the Gregorian calendar, that is saved as that calendar, rather than defaulting to Julian calendar. I can understand that we would generally default to Gregorian for anything after the creation, just an extra step, and an extra opportunity to muck up.  — billinghurst sDrewth 00:03, 12 February 2017 (UTC)

I'm confused. IMO it really should default to the Gregorian calendar, because that's what everyone uses. If a history book says something about a date in the 500s, they're almost certainly using the Gregorian calendar. In practice, if unspecified, it should be assumed to be Gregorian. However, afaict the current Wikidata system defaults to the Julian calendar for earlier dates, which is why I've been needing to manually fiddle with every single early date I add, which is rather frustrating. --Yair rand (talk) 22:37, 12 February 2017 (UTC)
Pope Gregory came around in the late 16th century, so how and why would pre-16thC calendars use that date system and why would we look to compensate for such a date? That would be the Julian. [Reality is that if we are recording just a year, the calendar should be nude of a classification as who knows.] Then we just have to manage the implementation of dual calendars between 1580s and 1750s while the protestant nations didn't follow the edicts of Catholic pope, then the orthodox churches through to the early 20th century for the same reasons. Plus it is weird that you are having Julian as your default, and I seem to have Gregorian as my default.  — billinghurst sDrewth 00:01, 13 February 2017 (UTC)
For the user interface, the default for years before the Gregorian calendar was created is Julian. Just try it in Wikidata Sandbox (Q4115189). Jc3s5h (talk) 00:26, 13 February 2017 (UTC)
Okay, I see it, though it didn't happen for me the other day. Weird. I can also see that the gadget "Primary Sources list" doesn't do it either, so there must be a different mechanism in place for that tool.  — billinghurst sDrewth 05:37, 13 February 2017 (UTC)
Don't modern statements of historic dates typically use the Proleptic Gregorian calendar? --Yair rand (talk) 06:50, 13 February 2017 (UTC)
No, modern statements of historic dates typically do not use the proleptic Gregorian calendar, but I have to qualify that. If the statement is in English and written for people in the countries where English is the primary language, and if the event occurred in a place where the Julian or Roman calendars were in force, then the date will typically be stated in those calendars. I'm not sure how statements in other languages, especially non-European languages, would be written. I'm also not sure how English-language statements about historic events in places where the Julian or Roman calendar were never used would be written. Jc3s5h (talk) 01:39, 14 February 2017 (UTC)

How to set up a default value for a property

User:Discanto asked me a question that I find useful, but I have no idea what to answer. Is it possible to make a default value appear in a box when we are inserting a property? For example if an Italian user want to insert the "country" property can he find "italy" as a default value? Can it be customized in any easy way? That would be very useful to speed up the work for some of the users I follow. Thank you in advance.--Alexmar983 (talk) 12:34, 13 February 2017 (UTC)

I'm not aware of a direct way. When adding a lot of data like this it can however be useful to use QuickStatements and preformat the data with Excel/LibreOffice Calc. ChristianKl (talk) 12:06, 14 February 2017 (UTC)
There is MediaWiki:Gadget-currentDate.js available as a gadget at Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-gadgets. It puts the current date into retrieved (P813) by default. —MisterSynergy (talk) 12:11, 14 February 2017 (UTC)

Pignatelli

Please merge Q20997623 and Q2094670, they both are disambiguation pages, one with links to wp:de, wp:en and wp:es, the other one to wp:it. --Gejotape (talk) 07:45, 14 February 2017 (UTC)

Pignatelli (Q20997623) is no disambiguation page but an item for a last name. The Italian page for Pignatelli (Q2094670) is about more than just a last name and also list architecture. It's debateable to which of those two Wikidata items the English Wikipedia page should go, but there's no basis for merging the Wikidata items. ChristianKl (talk) 08:20, 14 February 2017 (UTC)
The english page is about surname, the others are real disambiguation. I moved the english page. --ValterVB (talk) 17:54, 14 February 2017 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #247

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Development
    • Doing a trial run of allowing search engines to index a number of ArticlePlaceholder pages on Welsh Wikipedia. If there are no major issues we will enable this for all placeholders.
    • Improving Federation-related after initial tests,
    • Getting ready to deploy automated sitelinks for Wiktionary
    • Further work on the new datatype for geoshapes (phabricator:T57549)

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here.


Age at event

I have tried to locate a property or earlier discussion for a property for the age of the subject at the time of an event. This would be needed for example when presenting age information where the exact date of birth would not be published for a living person. Another usage I have encountered are notes of the age of the mother of a born baby in parish registers. Being able to record the actual data of the source would prevent from interpreting the data unnecessarily, if the year of birth was deduced from the age data. If there's any support, I will make the property proposal. – Susanna Ånäs (Susannaanas) (talk) 09:16, 9 February 2017 (UTC)

I agree that such a property would be useful given that quite often the birth year isn't available but the age at an event is. ChristianKl (talk) 09:52, 9 February 2017 (UTC)
Thanks a lot! I will create the proposal! Cheers, Susanna Ånäs (Susannaanas) (talk) 10:19, 9 February 2017 (UTC)
Created! – Susanna Ånäs (Susannaanas) (talk) 11:22, 9 February 2017 (UTC)
Changes made to scope & name based on discussion. Hoping that the property could be created - pressing need for it. One more day until a week of notice. Could it be made already today? – Susanna Ånäs (Susannaanas) (talk) 08:31, 15 February 2017 (UTC)

Looking for qualifier to use when calculating date of birth

Can someone please point me to the qualifier pair to use where you can calculate a year of birth when you have a date in another record at a point in time with an age. I think that there could be some value in adding some batches of qualifiers against the lists that we generate for properties, eg. against "date of birth" Having to dig for these is a PITA.  — billinghurst sDrewth 10:06, 14 February 2017 (UTC)

I think the nearest we get is the generic sourcing circumstances (P1480) -- one could qualify with "circa" and maybe a new value "calculated date"
Susanna Anas has a proposal in for a qualifier "age at event" which, once adopted, could be used to record the age in the record with the date. Jheald (talk) 19:59, 14 February 2017 (UTC)
Yes, I saw that later when hunting and probing through wikidata: ns links to date of birth. "Age at event" records data at the event, and it needs a reciprocated qualifier for the evidence (my comment at the proposal). I am comfortable with "sourcing circumstances" and something like "estimated" or "calculated" though don't see the need for the additional specification of "... date", though *if* we are making the jump, the reference itself is not sufficient, we need to tie in the event, it needs two factor authentication.  — billinghurst sDrewth 21:48, 14 February 2017 (UTC)
There is also inferred from (P3452), which lives in the references section for a statement, currently being used all of 10 times to indicate a total of 4 distinct sources. tinyurl.com/hyywflw
I think it was originally intended that its value should be a specific Wikidata item would specifically contain the information needed to verify the statement: so from the ownership details of Oriental Coin Cabinet Jena (Q824791) one can infer that each of those owners was a coin collector; or from the inclusion of an individual in list of coin collectors (Q19893121).
But it might be an acceptable use for its object to instead indicate the nature of the source of the information, eg "age at death". Jheald (talk) 10:30, 15 February 2017 (UTC)
A neat way to do this might be to propose a new property "inferred from property", with the constraint check that that property should also appear on the item. So one might have e.g.:
... etc. Jheald (talk) 11:17, 15 February 2017 (UTC)

meaning of has part(s) of the class (P2670): related to "has part" (composition)? Or more related to "has subclass"/"has superclass" (generalization/specialization)?

Which of the following is most correct about the meaning of has part(s) of the class (P2670) "has parts of the class"?

  1. has part(s) of the class (P2670) is a property that tells us something about the "parts"/composition of a class (or its instances), something like "has part" does (without having exactly the same meaning as "has part" of course)
  2. has part(s) of the class (P2670) is a property that helps define generalization or specialization of membership in this class, i.e. tells us something about whether certain things may or might not be instances of the class, something like "subclass of" (or its implicit inverse "superclass of") does (without having exactly the same meaning as "subclass of" or "superclass of", of course)
  3. has part(s) of the class (P2670) can mean either of 1 or 2 (ambiguous?)
  4. Neither 1 nor 2 is correct at all
  5. Undefined answer / meaningless question??

Some of the property's aliases seem suggestive of 1 or 2, but these are completely different meanings of the property. DavRosen (talk) 14:01, 14 February 2017 (UTC)

  • 1 is the intended meaning - this is a specialization of "has part" to cover the cases where one object has many subcomponents of a common class that may possibly be counted (the canonical example was "unvierse" and "stars"). Some folks seem to have edited the property labels, descriptions, and examples in the last few weeks to confuse this, particularly the "article" example seems to be your (2), and I believe is wrong according to the intended purpose of this. It was never intended to be an inverse relation to subclass of (P279). @TomT0m: as proposer - any additional comments on this? ArthurPSmith (talk) 14:22, 14 February 2017 (UTC)
    This is not a specialization. «Has part» is supposedly linking, on first approximation, instances of objects to other instances of objects, that is «my car» has part «my car’s rear left wheel». But «has part» is not supposed to express stuffs like «my car» has part «wheel». Wheel is a class of objects, «my car» is just an object. But we suppose it’s OK to link «car» to «wheel» with «has part» because they are both classes. In general, «has part» should probably only be used for classes which ar eof the same order (see Help:Classification and Metaclass_(Semantic_Web) for more what are classes and class order). --author  TomT0m / talk page 16:02, 14 February 2017 (UTC)
  • This query: most connected classes for has part(s) of the class (P2670) I found quite interesting.
The results should be interpretated as saying there are uses of the property of the form
<instance of> column 1 has part(s) of the class (P2670) <sub-type of> column 2.
The only one might look a bit odd from that query might be the line:
( <instance of> States-Provincial (Q2097101) ) has part(s) of the class (P2670) ( <sub-type of> position (Q4164871))
but looking at an actual concrete example,
Provincial Executive of Utrecht (Q27650837) has part(s) of the class (P2670) member of the Provincial Executive of Utrecht (Q27650845)
I suppose that does make sense. Jheald (talk) 14:42, 14 February 2017 (UTC)
  • So it could be described as "has part that is an instance of" or "has one or more parts that are instances of"? Perhaps someone could edit the description and aliases to make them less ambiguous? DavRosen (talk) 16:36, 14 February 2017 (UTC)
I edited the 'en' description and removed the bad example; other languages may also need some attention. ArthurPSmith (talk) 16:56, 14 February 2017 (UTC)
Okay, your new description (1 below) does look much better to me than the old one. But compare these as sentences (the way many of us "read" property relations):
  1. Joe's car contains items that are instances of the target class wheel.
  2. Joe's car has parts that are instances of the class wheel.
  3. Joe's car has parts that are instances of wheel.
  4. Joe's car has parts (some constituents) that are instances of wheel.
In my opinion, (1) makes an awkward sentence, and "contains items" could easily be misinterpreted to mean "has instances", rather than "has part(s)". Also the other properties don't usually have the word "target" which not everyone might understand. But "class" could be misinterpreted as refering to the subject item having this property, and (2) is still a bit awkward, so I would favor someting more like (3), or, better yet, (4). DavRosen (talk) 17:25, 14 February 2017 (UTC) - edit; added (4) DavRosen (talk) 17:49, 14 February 2017 (UTC)
@DavRosen: well the label of the property still says "has parts of the class"; between label and description the idea is to be clear. I don't actually see a way to translate your (3) or (4) into description text, do you have something specific in mind? And if you do have something concrete perhaps you should just edit it yourself? ArthurPSmith (talk) 19:25, 14 February 2017 (UTC)
@Ogoorcs: you have done some editing of this property's description in other languages (eg. Italian) - and using it elsewhere - please ensure what you are doing is consistent with what we have discussed here, or contribute to the discussion here, thanks! ArthurPSmith (talk) 15:06, 15 February 2017 (UTC)
@Ogoorcs: check your Italian description (& aliases?) again; it might not be consistent with the English description which I just updated again to help make it less ambiguous.DavRosen (talk) 17:58, 15 February 2017 (UTC)
@DavRosen: @ArthurPSmith: I'm sorry for delay, I'll add my contribution to this topic and check aliases and property as soon as I can. --Ogoorcs (talk) 18:13, 15 February 2017 (UTC)

Continuing this topic in a new section down below. DavRosen (talk) 17:52, 15 February 2017 (UTC)

Election hackathon import

Hi, there is regarding the Finlands municipal elections 2012 and 2017 and 17. feb hackaton for the elections and plan was to upload all (total 37125 candidates with 9674 elected ones) candidates from 2012 elections to Wikidata, but because licensing issue is still under discussion and also least i think that there are some privacy issues for uploading all candidates it has been delayed. (in project page there is more information ) However hackaton is at friday so it would be nice to get elected ones online for the hacking so i would like to push them if it is ok  ? Older discussions for this are here and here.

Plan for this is next
  1. create new wikidata items for councilmembers which clearly doesn't exist in wikidata already (example Heli Piirainen (Q28777227)). (~7000 candidates)
  2. Handle clear cases of existing ones by hand (~1000 candidates eg just approve by hand the updating of the existing wikidata items)
  3. Do something tho the rest (manual work is needed)

Also implementation least for creating the new items is using quickstatement if it works nicely and if it is not then pywikibot. --Zache (talk) 09:42, 15 February 2017 (UTC)

Equivalent of QuickStatements to remove statements?

I have found many cheese varieties whose item is an instance of cheese, whereas I believe they should be a sub-class of cheese.

Question: How to remove these many instance of (P31) statements quickly and easily?

Unfortunately QuickStatements does not seem to have that feature yet. Thanks! Syced (talk) 13:37, 15 February 2017 (UTC)

Petscan can perform SPARQL queries and add/remove claims on the results set once you’ve authorized Widar. —MisterSynergy (talk) 13:47, 15 February 2017 (UTC)
PetScan works for this indeed, thanks! Memo: Tab "Other sources" (not "Wikidata"), enter SPARQL query, run, ignore error messages, authenticate WiDar, enter "-P31:Q10943" and execute. Syced (talk) 04:52, 16 February 2017 (UTC)
The new version of QuickStatements does include it. Matěj Suchánek (talk) 14:54, 15 February 2017 (UTC)
That version of QuickStatement says "Try it on the Sandbox item only, for now", and actually I can't figure out how to load items in it. Syced (talk) 03:34, 16 February 2017 (UTC)

has part(s) of the class (P2670) (description and aliases)

It appears that the description and aliases are still being mistranslated (presumably misinterpreted) even as #1 below, so I tried to make it even more explicit as #2, and then added an additional part of the description that makes its close relationship to "has part" (P527) clearer (this is #4 --edit: I had #3 but it was too long--).

  1. class having instances (members) that are asserted to be components (parts) of the subject (whole)
  2. class having some instance(s) that are each asserted to be a component «part of (P361)» (NOT an instance of) the subject instance(s)
  3. class having instance(s) that are asserted to be component «parts of (P361)» (NOT instances of) the subject. The subject (if it is not a class), or each instance of the subject (if a class), «has part(s) (P527)» (not instances) that are each an instance of this target object (class)
  4. class having instance(s) that are asserted to be component «parts of (P361)» (NOT instances of) the subject. The subject (or each of its instances if a class) «has part(s) (P527)» (not instances) that are each an instance of this object.

I know it's long but I don't know how else to prevent misinterpretation. I think the problem is that we haven't found an English word for component that can't be (mis)interpreted to mean component of a set or instance of a class. Other suggestions?
Also I'm tweaking the aliases so that some of them might translate better even if some might sound awkward in English, and adding some property references to them. If they are too long or whatever, let me know (or trim them down).
DavRosen (talk) 17:51, 15 February 2017 (UTC)

  • I'm pinging the Ontology project folks here. In your #4 I think you can leave out the 2nd and 3rd parenthetical statements - "or each of its instances if a class" and "not instances", a description doesn't have to be totally comprehensive and I think it's clear enough without those. Further details could be provided as Wikidata usage instructions but I'm not sure that's really needed here. ArthurPSmith (talk) 21:52, 15 February 2017 (UTC)

WikiProject Ontology has more than 50 participants and couldn't be pinged. Please post on the WikiProject's talk page instead.

  • Okay. I, too, am interested to hear any input from Ontology proj. Based on my limited experience with wikidata, my thinking was, I've seen large numbers of divergent uses of the most basic properties, so why not try to cover all the basic use cases in the description (within 250 chars) so that one can check it without going to a faq or a help page repeatedly. One of the most basic questions that I and many others still aren't clear on is *precisely* what a given class-class relationship means (i.e. exactly what it implies about the instances of subj vs instances of obj), so I thought we should spell it out for a particular property -- I don't think it's obvious to everyone. Also this particular property apparently hasn't been added to the basic membership properties page :-) DavRosen (talk) 23:01, 15 February 2017 (UTC)
  • BTW, I tried to follow the pattern that "most" of the property descriptions do (I looked at dozens of them): they are intentionally written as direct descriptions of the target object (without explicitly saying so), while the subject must be referred to as such explicitly. (But if there is a second sentence in the description this doesn't need to follow the same rule.) Confusingly, among the notable exceptions to the point-of-view-of-the-object rule are the current descriptions of "part of" and "subclass of" :-) DavRosen (talk) 23:48, 15 February 2017 (UTC)

A new Labs Tool to visually explore etymological relationships extracted from the English Wiktionary and an RDF database of etymological relationships

Hi all! I have developed a tool to visualize etymologies. Please check it out at tools.wmflabs.org/etytree. My work is funded by an IEG grant. Please leave your feedback here. It will help improve it.

As a first release, it's is impressive how well automatic extraction of data works (with some bugs of course...). This is because Etymology Sections are written using well defined standars. I would like to get some feedback about some difficulties I have encountered while extracting data and some ideas I have about new templates. I wrote some notes here. Please add your comment there if you have any. Some additional notes follow:

  1. I could not use trees as in the nicer demo because there are loops between words that cannot be fit in trees (in trees branches don't merge). Loops are conflicting etymologies. Many are due to simple inconsistencies that users can easily fix, others are real conflicting etymologies and should be represented using multiple trees. I will work on this in a future release.
  2. Etymology Sections rarely link to words and their sense/pos, generally only link to the lemma. This is a problem for homographs, cause they generally have different etymological trees which get mixed up in this current implementation. See for example the discussion on the Etymology Scriptorium. It would be nice to have more precise links in etymology sections that link to the correct word.
  3. I am not plotting all derived words as of now to clean up a bit the visualization.

Looking forward to your comments! Epantaleo (talk) 18:29, 15 February 2017 (UTC)

a screenshot of the graph for word coffee
a screenshot of the graph for word coffee
Looks great! Regarding your Suggestions on how to make Etymology Sections easy to parse, did you present them at wiktionary yet (maybe even at bot requests)? Thank you for this awesome work! --Atlasowa (talk) 21:01, 15 February 2017 (UTC)
@User:Atlasowa: Thanks for your feedback! I have posted something in the beer parlour, the etymology scriptorium and the grease pit. Do you have more specific ideas? I'll try with mailing lists maybe. Epantaleo (talk) 00:12, 16 February 2017 (UTC)

Review of initial updates on Wikimedia movement strategy process

Note: Apologies for cross-posting and sending in English. Message is available for translation on Meta-Wiki.

The Wikimedia movement is beginning a movement-wide strategy discussion, a process which will run throughout 2017. For 15 years, Wikimedians have worked together to build the largest free knowledge resource in human history. During this time, we've grown from a small group of editors to a diverse network of editors, developers, affiliates, readers, donors, and partners. Today, we are more than a group of websites. We are a movement rooted in values and a powerful vision: all knowledge for all people. As a movement, we have an opportunity to decide where we go from here.

This movement strategy discussion will focus on the future of our movement: where we want to go together, and what we want to achieve. We hope to design an inclusive process that makes space for everyone: editors, community leaders, affiliates, developers, readers, donors, technology platforms, institutional partners, and people we have yet to reach. There will be multiple ways to participate including on-wiki, in private spaces, and in-person meetings. You are warmly invited to join and make your voice heard.

The immediate goal is to have a strategic direction by Wikimania 2017 to help frame a discussion on how we work together toward that strategic direction.

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states with limited recognition

What is the criteria for state with limited recognition (Q15634554)? This is a complex and politically sensitive area. How many states must not recognise you before you should be given the label "state with limited recognition"? 31 UN member states refuse to recognise Israel–does that make Israel a "state with limited recognition"? 136 UN member states recognise Palestine, the UN itself calls it an "observer state", and it is a member of UNESCO (a UN specialised agency) and the International Criminal Court–is that not enough to remove the label "state with limited recognition" from Palestine? 110 UN member states recognise Kosovo, and it is also a member of the IMF and the World Bank (both also UN specialised agencies)–is that not enough to remove the label "state with limited recognition" from Kosovo? I feel like the current categorisation of states as "state with limited recognition" could be seen by some as politically biased (even if only unintentionally so). SJK (talk) 12:38, 12 February 2017 (UTC)

The general idea is that you add claims with reputable citations. If different sources claim different things multiple claims can be added and statement disputed by (P1310) can be used. Wikidata itself doesn't set the standards. ChristianKl (talk) 13:19, 12 February 2017 (UTC)
There are two problems with that idea (1) current usage of "states with limited recognition" has no references – State of Palestine (Q219060) has claim P31 Q15634554, but no reference; same claim made on Kosovo (Q1246) but again no references – do we remove these claims until references are provided? (2) it isn't clear what reference is sufficient to justify "states with limited recognition". For example, considering the case of Israel, there is a resolution passed by the US House of Representatives saying (bottom of page 1) "Whereas the following countries still do not recognize Israel’s right to exist: Afghanistan, Algeria, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Brunei, Chad, Comoros, Cuba, Djibouti, Guinea, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Malaysia, Maldives, Mali, Morocco, Niger, North Korea, Oman, Pakistan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Tunisia, United Arab Emirates, and Yemen" – is that reference enough to call Israel a "state with limited recognition"? Or, this book Tomis Kapitan, "Philosophical Perspectives on the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict", p. 334 says "The limited recognition of Israel's factual existence is enough for pragmatically oriented peace negotiations to begin and perhaps even to reach some result. But continued refusal to affirm de jure the right to Israel's original and continued existence is self-defeating to everyone and is destabilizing concerning any lasting peace"–is that cite enough to label Israel a "state with limited recognition"? Unless we have objective criteria to define what a "state with limited recognition" means, how do we decide whether any given reference is sufficient to justify the claim? SJK (talk) 20:04, 12 February 2017 (UTC)
@SJK: if you have reference, please add them ; (almost) anything is better than nothing. For touchy case like that, the abundance of reference can only be welcomed. As for the signification state with limited recognition (Q15634554), I'd say that any states that in not fully recognise has ipso facto and by definition only a limited recognition. Cdlt, VIGNERON (talk) 22:41, 13 February 2017 (UTC)
Do you think the people who wrote that house resolutions would find it fair to describe their document as stating that Israel is a state with limited recognition? In this case I doubt that's the case. But there's likely a source that you could find that actually thinks that's the case.
Whether a state accepts Israels right to exist and whether it recognises Israel are also two different issues. ChristianKl (talk) 08:25, 14 February 2017 (UTC)
@ChristianKl: Whether a state accepts Israels right to exist and whether it recognises Israel are also two different issues–are they separate issues? I mean, do any states recognise Israel yet deny its right to exist? Or conversely, do any states accept Israel's right to exist yet refuse to recognise it? In both case I believe the answer is "none". Or, to give another example, does the Republic of Serbia recognise the Republic of Kosovo's right to exist? Serbia denies both that the Republic of Kosovo legally exists and that it has a legal right to exist. Or, yet another example, Israel denies the legal existence of the State of Palestine, which surely implies it would also deny that the State of Palestine has any legal "right to exist". Why does state A refuse recognition of state B? Generally it is because state A considers the process by which state B claims to have come into existence to be illegal or illegitimate–if state A believes that about B, they will surely deny that B has any legal or moral "right to exist" as a state. Indeed, the authors of the cited resolution say "the Republic of Iraq continues to refuse to recognize the existence of the State of Israel and urges the Government of Iraq to recognize the right of Israel to exist", implying that they see "recognition of existence" and "recognition of the right to existence" as at the very least closely connected if not largely identical. Do you think the people who wrote that house resolutions would find it fair to describe their document as stating that Israel is a state with limited recognition? Well, the whole point of the document is to complain about the fact that Iraq (along with 32 other states they list) do not recognise Israel–if 33 states do not recognise Israel, how is that not a case of "limited recognition"–"limited" here meaning "less than universal" (and 33 less is a significant number less)–as contrasted with the universal recognition of Israel which the authors of the resolution desire to achieve? The fact that Israel is a state with limited (as opposed to universal) recognition is the very thing they are objecting to and trying to change, so it would be very contradictory for them to deny that fact. SJK (talk) 10:31, 14 February 2017 (UTC)
Recognition can come through some sort of treaty. I'm for example not sure whether you can be a WTO member without formally recognizing other WTO countries. ChristianKl (talk) 11:09, 14 February 2017 (UTC)
@ChristianKl: Generally speaking that isn't true. To quote the Yearbook of the International Law Commission 1998, Volume 2, part 1, p. 251-252, "it is generally accepted that participation in the same multilateral treaty does not signify mutual recognition, even implicit". It makes that comment while discussing treaty reservations lodged by Arab states at the times of ratifying multilateral treaties to which Israel is a party saying that ratification of the treaty is not an implicit recognition of Israel–the ILC argues those these reservations are legally speaking unnecessary, since even without the reservation the ratification is not an implicit recognition of its states parties; as well as Arab non-recognition of Israel, it discusses unrelated cases, e.g. Australia's non-recognition of East Germany, North Korea, North Vietnam and the People's Republic of China at the time of ratifying the Geneva Conventions in 1949. On the same point I can cite "Text of the draft guidelines constituting the Guide to Practice on Reservations to Treaties, with commentaries, as provisionally adopted by the International Law Commission" which says on page 74, again while discussing reservations denying recognition, "in some cases, the author of the statement is simply taking a “precautionary step” by pointing out, in accordance with a well-established practice, that its participation in a treaty to which an entity that it does not recognize as a State is a party does not amount to recognition". Both ILC documents cite, as justification for the proposition that ratification of a multilateral treaty does not imply even implicit mutual recognition, J. Verhoeven, La reconnaissance internationale dans la pratique contemporaine, Paris, Pédone, 1975, pp. 429–431 (I don't have access to that book, and even if I did, I couldn't understand it because it is in French.) (Bilateral treaties are different from multilateral treaties–unlike a multilateral treaty, a bilateral treaty is evidence of mutual recognition.) Now, if that is the general rule for multilateral treaties, it should be the rule to be applied in the case of WTO membership as well, unless there is some good reason to suppose WTO membership should be treated specially compared to other multilateral treaties. SJK (talk) 08:30, 16 February 2017 (UTC)
And why Islamic State (Q2429253), a terrorist group, is also a state with limited recognition (Q15634554) (at least on Bosnian Wikipedia and Catalan Wikipedia)? --Liuxinyu970226 (talk) 15:38, 15 February 2017 (UTC)
Well, a "state with limited recognition"–"limited" implies at least some recognition not "none", but as far as I am aware no state recognises ISIS. So this is incorrect. I think the question is whether ISIS is a "state with no recognition" or not a state at all, and that's a difficult question, because it depends on a disputed question of international law – the declarative theory of recognition vs. the constitutive theory. The declarative theory says that states don't depend on recognition to exist, so it is possible for a state to be a state even if no other state recognises–so, even if no other state recognises ISIS, ISIS could still be a state if it meets the factual criteria for being one; by contrast, the constitutive theory says that states exist because they are recognised, so if no one recognises you as a state you can't be one–by that theory ISIS can't be a state. Now, the mainstream position says the declarative theory is correct and the constitutive theory has been rejected, so it is at least possible that ISIS is in fact a state recognised by no one but themselves – but while that is the mainstream position in international law I don't think it is universally accepted. SJK (talk) 08:39, 16 February 2017 (UTC)

Property for board and card game creators

Hey everyone,

I've noticed, that there's no consistent way of stating the creators of board and card games.


The two mainly used properties are:

  • Author(P50) which I think is wrong since this is the property for creators of a written work according to the definition. I can see how this happens al lot though, since in German it's called the "Spieleautor" so people resort to P50. Example
  • Developer(P178) which isn't technically wrong since it's intended for creators of software, games etc. but it's mainly used for software/digital products so it might be confusing to use this one. Example

And then of course there's the generic Creator(P170) which can be used for anything but doesn't seem to be used for board games much.

Many items don't have anyone stated as their creator even when there are a handful of other statements there. Don't know if it is directly connected to this issue though.


I think we should decide on which property is the right one to use for board and card games.

My questions are:

  • Should it be the same one used for computer games?
  • Should game authors get a separate property?
  • ...


Any ideas/opinions would be very welcome! Incabell (talk) 16:16, 13 February 2017 (UTC)

-- just saw that BoardGameGeek calls them designers. Incabell (talk) 16:37, 13 February 2017 (UTC)

I agree "designer" is the right term for board games, e.g. it's echoed on Wikipedia as well, and there's often a dedicated credit for that role (even to the point of being a selling point for board games). Does "designed by" property therefore work? Then, the designer can have "game designer" assigned to their item entry, as appropriate? Video games, on the other hand, have more varied and elaborate credits, particularly for larger projects. For example, Sid Meier is listed as "director" of Civilization V, yet according to MobyGames, he's technically the "Creative Director" while there are also 3-4 other people in different "director" roles on the game, plus another person yet (not Sid) who's listed as "designer." Should all these credits be modeled? Maybe, maybe not; and complicating things further, this mix of roles is probably different between studios or even projects. So, "designed by" for board games, more discussion for video games? Argotechnica (talk) 02:16, 14 February 2017 (UTC)
I think it's not that easy: The term "game designer" is common in the englisch language, in German the same person is named "Spieleautor" while the designer is that person who is responsible for the artwork (artist in english board game descriptions). Therefore I would say that "Spieleautor" = "game designer" should be a property by it's own to avoid the problems described above. -- Achim Raschka (talk) 09:29, 14 February 2017 (UTC)
Good point - and someone listed on a game under the "game designer" property may not necessarily be considered to have the "occupation" property of game designer. So - new property, "game designer"? Argotechnica (talk) 18:13, 14 February 2017 (UTC)
I like that idea. Just for clarification, would this then be exclusively for non-computer games i.e. board- and card games? If we make the German translation of "game designer" -"Spieleautor" this will not be usable for computer games at least from the German language side. Otherweise it would probably need to be something like "Spieleentwickler". Incabell (talk) 11:07, 15 February 2017 (UTC)
IMO it would be better to use quite a generic property - eg creator (P170) or contributor to the creative work or subject (P767), and then a qualifier to indicate the exact nature of the role. That is how film and music articles typically work at the moment, using P794 (P794) with a value to give more detail on the nature of the contribution; eg:
object named as (P1932) can be used to give even more information:
The film industry has evolved fairly defined terms for particular roles; for video games things may be a lot more fluid, so more generic properties like creator (P170) or author (P50) may be a good idea. The advantage of using something fairly generic, and then qualifying it, is that the grouping together makes searching a lot more straightforward, so that doesn't have to search separately for "director", "supervising director", "sequence director" etc; but one can still extract any of those particular roles out if one wants.
There is a general preference on Wikidata not to multiply the number of properties unless really necessary: to prefer properties to be generic, and specify details using items. This principle will probably be argued to you in opposition, if you propose a new highly specific property without a very good case. Jheald (talk) 14:22, 15 February 2017 (UTC)
I should add that P794 (P794) is currently being discussed, and may be divided into two new qualifier properties, "subject has role" and "object has role"; but the principle stands. Jheald (talk) 14:30, 15 February 2017 (UTC)
That's a very fair point you have. I just want there to be a consensus on how to do it, so the statements are the structured the same way. I've created Wikidata:WikiProject_Board_Games to have a central place to collect and discuss how to structe board game items and so forth. I suggest to move all further discussion to the talk page there. Incabell (talk) 10:53, 16 February 2017 (UTC)

Split "Holy See–Italy relations" and "Apostolic Nunciature to Italy"?

Italy has an embassy in Vatican, and Vatican has an embassy (called nunciature) in Italy.

So I am worried to see that Holy See–Italy relations (Q3932303) is marked as an instance of apostolic nunciature (Q620045) (a subclass of embassy (Q3917681)).

Ideally I believe there should be one Wikidata item for every single embassy. But I guess providing "Apostolska nunciatura v Italiji" visitors an interwiki link is considered better than nothing?

Looking forward to hearing your advice about this, thanks! Syced (talk) 13:31, 15 February 2017 (UTC)

Your thinking is absolutely correct; the English and Italian links should be split off into their own item since they cover relations and not the locations through which these relations happen. Mahir256 (talk) 14:40, 15 February 2017 (UTC)
Thanks for your feedback! Done: Apostolic Nunciature to Italy (Q28788295) Syced (talk) 07:44, 16 February 2017 (UTC)

refugee

How do I state that somebody is a refugee? Thanks, GerardM (talk) 16:42, 15 February 2017 (UTC)

Don't. Nikkimaria (talk) 02:36, 16 February 2017 (UTC)
I don't support labelling someone a refugee. MechQuester (talk) 02:40, 16 February 2017 (UTC)
When people make a point of BEING a refugee, it is important to be able to register it. Mind you I stopped adding ethnicity and mostly nationality because it is so problematic. But denying that refugees exist is worse than our registering that people have been in jail. Thanks, GerardM (talk) 06:19, 16 February 2017 (UTC)
Given, for example, the individuals listed under en:Category:Refugees, it would seem reasonable to describe at least some subjects as being, or having been, refugees. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 12:48, 16 February 2017 (UTC)
Use 'significant event', with properties like "applied for asylum", "asylum granted". Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 12:48, 16 February 2017 (UTC)

What property would you use for a "refugee"? MechQuester (talk) 06:29, 16 February 2017 (UTC)

There is refugee (Q131572) and asylum seeker (Q564811). Thanks GerardM (talk) 07:21, 16 February 2017 (UTC)

Proportion of female voters and votes

I have used female population (P1539) to express the number of women voters of all voters. Since we are querying human (Q5) it seems to suit well. However for the proportion of votes cast by women, I used a different structure with applies to part (P518), because we are querying votes rather than humans. This is horrible to query. How would you do this? Here's an example. – Susanna Ånäs (Susannaanas) (talk) 12:28, 16 February 2017 (UTC)

I think you are right. If this is put on the main "ballots cast" statement, it will really mess up querying, because the most common queries would be for the total ballots cast.
Instead, I think a separate property "breakdown of ballots cast" would be useful, with a mandatory "applies to part" qualifier. That would keep this data away from the total ballots cast, thus removing the possibility of confusion, and be more efficient for queries. Queries for total ballots cast wouldn't have to filter to avoid the qualifier; and queries for partial ballot counts wouldn't have to avoid the total ballot counts. Jheald (talk) 14:41, 16 February 2017 (UTC)

Pings

Hello. I have just created the following pages, to help us find people interested in specific English-speaking countries:

Please don't hesitate to add your name to the list so that you can get pings whenever the subject might be of interest to you. Thierry Caro (talk) 12:55, 16 February 2017 (UTC)

Linking to these pages are property proposals where your vote would already be useful. Thierry Caro (talk) 13:04, 16 February 2017 (UTC)

Items without articles in wikipedias

There are Wikidata items about Russian mathematicians without articles in Wikipedias:

Is it normal, or these entries should be deleted? -- Andrew Krizhanovsky (talk) 20:17, 5 February 2017 (UTC)

It is normal. See Wikidata:Notability.--ԱշոտՏՆՂ (talk) 21:08, 5 February 2017 (UTC)
yes, it is normal, the work is not finished. here is translation tool mw:Content translation. Slowking4 (talk) 12:34, 6 February 2017 (UTC)

But in the case of the latter three, how is Notability established? They do not fulfill a structural need and have no sitelinks. I am not sure about the serious and publicly available references. And it is about Living People, and their data is unsourced. I would question whether these should really stay. --Denny (talk) 22:53, 8 February 2017 (UTC)

They each have multiple recognizably important external identifiers: which means that other data sources find this notable. I would call that structurally important: after all Wikidata is serving not only our projects, but connecting other kinds of projects. Sadads (talk) 23:10, 8 February 2017 (UTC)
OK, agreed on the second and fourth - they have good external identifiers, like library of congress. But the third one does not. Both of his external identifiers are going to crowdsourced sites. I am unsure here, and would suggest to consider the case. --Denny (talk) 05:02, 9 February 2017 (UTC)
The Mathematics Genealogy Project is a serious source. It describes the person. ChristianKl (talk) 11:05, 9 February 2017 (UTC)
It is crowdsourced and the data is not being checked beyond crowdsourcing. Whereas I obviously appreciate crowdsourced material, I would refrain from using it blindly as a source. Having it additionally to at least one good source would be fine with me, but we are lacking that for the third person above still. --Denny (talk) 17:56, 10 February 2017 (UTC)
I'm not sure whether calling the Mathematics Genealogy Project crowdsourced is right. They take submitted datasets and integrate them. I see no sign that they don't do sanity checks on the submitted data. Additionally zbmath seems to have peer-review for their entries. ChristianKl (talk) 09:20, 11 February 2017 (UTC)
I just took one example - starting at number 3 above, I continued clicking on the first advisor to the end and came to this last link: https://www.genealogy.math.ndsu.nodak.edu/id.php?id=201288 - Checking the articles on the advisor and the student, and trying to find any evidence for it for a few minutes, I came up with nothing. Don't misunderstand me, I really like the MGP, but I don't trust the data as a primary source. Regarding zbMath, I tried an edit there, and it seems indeed that edits go through a peer review first, so that seems better. --Denny (talk) 21:03, 11 February 2017 (UTC)
I had no problem with finding https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10288-007-0065-1 by searching for author and advisor. To the extent we can trust the scientific publisher springer the person wrote a thesis with this advisor. ChristianKl (talk) 10:12, 12 February 2017 (UTC)

I am agree with Denny that only "Mathematics Genealogy Project" is not enough for person's notability. If we will decide that MGP shows a notability of a person, then we can create Wikidata item for every person who wrote math Dissertation. But it is nonsense. -- Andrew Krizhanovsky (talk) 06:24, 12 February 2017 (UTC)

Why is it nonsense? It's information for which there are trustworthy sources. Having the data allows queries to be made that for example compare the average amount of dissertations that a professor oversees per country. Wikidata is structured data. Having data sets linked together in a way that it's possible to query them with computers is valuable. ChristianKl (talk) 10:12, 12 February 2017 (UTC)
But we're talking here about unsourced personal data of every single math PhD in the world - their birth day, place of birth, etc. This should be at least be required to be sourced, and not be added through a game. --Denny (talk) 18:35, 12 February 2017 (UTC)
the source is MGP. i do not think you have a consensus to exclude "game" information. are you gaming wikidata to conform to your wikipedia bias? Slowking4 (talk) 05:51, 15 February 2017 (UTC)
@Denny: There's no birth day filled for Dmitry Kvasov (Q21694206). The one that's filled for Viktor Gorbunov (Q18558636) comes from http://www-gap.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Biographies/Gorbunov.html which seems to be a nice academic source.
When looking at the history of the people in question I don't see that this data was added through a Wikidata game. What do you mean with the term game in this context? ChristianKl (talk) 14:31, 15 February 2017 (UTC)
Sorry, no, this was not meant in particular for this. I am just worried that by having the notability criteria so low as to say "yes, everyone with a PhD" - between 1 and 2% of the population of some countries - and then have at the same time have games going through items with missing data where people make decisions in a snap second about living people who are undersourced might lead to problems. --Denny (talk) 19:26, 16 February 2017 (UTC)
I don't think the problem of games adding data to living people in a snap decision has much to do with the quantity of data we have. We might simply avoid building games that fill in information without references about "place of birth" and "date of birth". ChristianKl (talk) 20:08, 16 February 2017 (UTC)

Property:P952 ISCO code - string instead of identifier

Why that? Looks like nonsense. 77.180.151.137 00:02, 14 February 2017 (UTC)

See Wikidata:Identifier migration/0. Sjoerd de Bruin (talk) 12:38, 14 February 2017 (UTC)

2 days past since looking, and it is still a string. 78.55.123.205 19:47, 16 February 2017 (UTC)

Pywikibot

Yesterday i tried to use Pywikibot to create statement with claims and i was unable to figure out how it should be working. It seems that least these examples 1 and 2 are out of date and it is possible that pywikibot:s code is too. However currently i am out of my skills with that so i ask if somebody with better skills can show me how to create claim with one qualifier and with source with information enough to be rendered properly at someday. In example property position held (P39) in item Vuokko Vakkuri (Q28789936) is something what i am trying to do using pywikibots claim.addSources() and claim.addQualifier() functions. --Zache (talk) 13:45, 16 February 2017 (UTC)

There is Wikidata:Pywikibot - Python 3 Tutorial. --Molarus 14:33, 16 February 2017 (UTC)
I believe these examples are ok.
# assume you've got an 'item' you want to modify and the repository as 'repo'
claim = pywikibot.Claim(repo, 'P39') # you initialize the claim, though it's a stub object now
target = pywikibot.ItemPage(repo, 'Q18694248') # this is the value
claim.setTarget(target) # now the claim is connected to the target but hasn't been saved yet
item.addClaim(claim) # this saves the claim to the item

qualifier = pywikibot.Claim(repo, 'P2715', isQualifier=True) # qualifiers are claims as well
qtarget = pywikibot.ItemPage(repo, 'Q28753630') # target for the qualifier
qualifier.setTarget(qtarget) # just like above, not saved yet
claim.addQualifier(qualifier) # 'claim' is already connected to the item, so we can attach a qualifier to it

date = pywikibot.Claim(repo, 'P813', isReference=True) # references are claims as well
date.setTarget(pywikibot.WbTime(year=2017, month=2, day=14))
publisher = pywikibot.Claim(repo, 'P123')
publisher.setTarget(pywikibot.ItemPage(repo, 'Q54718'))
title = pywikibot.Claim(repo, 'P1476')
title.setTarget(pywikibot.WbMonolingualText('Ylitornio: Ehdokkaat vertauslukujärjestyksessä', 'fi')) # yep, this is nowhere in the examples
url = pywikibot.Claim(repo, 'P854')
url.setTarget('http://vaalit.yle.fi/tulospalvelu/2012/kuntavaalit/kunnat/ylitornio_ehdokkaat_vertauslukujarjestyksessa_15_976.html')
claim.addSources([date, publisher, title, url])
Tested on the sandbox. Matěj Suchánek (talk) 16:22, 16 February 2017 (UTC)
You can find another sample here: SV-berg but I didn't run this one for about a year. Edoderoo (talk) 22:26, 16 February 2017 (UTC)

The point of having three instances of names?

Hi!

I noticed that the language links for the Wikipedia article of Felix was not linking correctly has the languages had been split into two groups. One group that used Felix (given name) and another group that used Felix (name). To resolve this I moved every language to Felix name and it now works.

However I don't see the point of having this setup with three instances of the same name and wonder why this is the case. Can someone explain? Almost every name can be used as both a given name and a surname and there is no reason to have separate pages for them. In the case of Felix the instances are:

Q971545 Felix (name) Q18177136 Felix (given name) Q18325135 Felix (surname)

Wouldn't it be enough to have just Felix (name)?

--Immunmotbluescreen (talk) 17:58, 14 February 2017 (UTC)

Exist a Wiki project for the Name. You can report there your doubts. Meanwhile I restore the item. --ValterVB (talk) 18:22, 14 February 2017 (UTC)
I don't really want to work on Wikidata, but from a Wikipedia perspective you vandalize. You should be able to reach the English version from other versions. The only way to achieve this is to place everything on name. You link did not specify clearly what to do in case of Wikidata:WikiProject_Names#For_a_combined_family_name_with_given_name. This way seem to be the same as the example of Alonso so it is correct? I reverted again manually.
--Immunmotbluescreen (talk) 21:20, 14 February 2017 (UTC)
Having only one name page instead of three would work, if Wikipedia does not have different pages for given names and family names, e.g. en:John (given name) and en:John (surname). Because Wikipedia does sometimes this distinction, we do it on Wikidata always. A mix of using sometimes one, sometimes two and sometimes three pages is not structured data. Moreover, there are certain properties, e.g. name day (P1750), which do only apply to given names but are wrong for family names. --Pasleim (talk) 10:48, 15 February 2017 (UTC)
Wikidata items don't exist primarily for interwiki links. Merging items together just to have more interwiki links is generally not desired. If you are not happy with the interwiki links that Wikidata provides you can manually add the ones you want on the Wikipedia side. ChristianKl (talk) 09:58, 17 February 2017 (UTC)

GS1 product codes

There are Wikidata properties for GS1 country codes and GS1 manufacturer codes. I was thinking of proposing adding a property for GS1 product category codes. Is there any problem in adding this kind of property? Peter F. Patel-Schneider (talk) 21:12, 15 February 2017 (UTC)

@Peter F. Patel-Schneider: I see no reason against it. You could create a property proposal at https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Property_proposal ChristianKl (talk) 13:37, 17 February 2017 (UTC)
I expect that this is the route I will go, probably with some other exploration first. Peter F. Patel-Schneider (talk) 15:18, 17 February 2017 (UTC)

Alexa rank updating bot

Hi everyone, I mainly edit on zhwp and recently I created a bot which can update the alexa rank in infoboxes automatically. When I requested for approval on zhwp, a wikipedian suggested me to run the bot here. Is there a similar bot running? If not, I'll be very glad to run one. However, I'm new to Wikidata and don't know where (i.e. which page to read) to start from. Can anyone tell me what to do next? Thanks, WhitePhosphorus (talk) 15:09, 10 February 2017 (UTC)

Our bot policy is at https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Bots . The next step is to create a new account for the bot and request permission for the bot at https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Requests_for_permissions/Bot . While the individual Wikipedia's mostly delete old data entries Wikidata puts a date on every entry and keeps old data. As a result I would say that running the bot once per year is fine to update the Alexa rankings on Wikidata but I wouldn't run it more often than that. ChristianKl (talk) 20:08, 10 February 2017 (UTC)
Or keep around the last 3 or so values and delete the older ones. For Alexa I believe the old values are not that important. --LydiaPintscher (talk) 14:47, 13 February 2017 (UTC)
I don't see why old values aren't interested. I can imagine myself interested in the historical traffic patterns of a website. ChristianKl (talk) 22:22, 17 February 2017 (UTC)

Tools to add multiple instances of the same claim

I have a problem. I'm wanting to add a series of claims like this to various items:

They need to be separated like this so that the dates and constituencies line up - as we can't nest qualifiers, this is currently the only way to do it. Adding them manually works, but I'll probably want to do this for ~10k items so manually won't scale.

Unfortunately, if I use QuickStatements, it skips the second set of qualifiers. QuickStatements2 adds all the qualifiers to the first P39 instance, which also doesn't help much. Are there any other tools out there that can do this? Andrew Gray (talk) 20:20, 17 February 2017 (UTC)

#Pywikibot without a doubt. Multichill (talk) 21:07, 17 February 2017 (UTC)
Excellent, thanks - I'll look into this :-). Andrew Gray (talk) 12:28, 18 February 2017 (UTC)

A tool to batch upload labels for wikidata items

Hello everyone, As a part of the data donation of translated place names, I have developed a label upload script which helps translators to batch upload a list of labels in a specific language for Wikidata items.

The tool uses pywikibot. The input is a CSV of wikidata Ids and corresponding translated labels to upload. The tool ensures that no duplicates entries are uploaded in the following manner:

Label in wikidata State Action
Present Matches with translation Doesn't get uploaded
Present Doesn't match with translation Uploaded as an alias (If it translation not present as alias)
Not present Uploaded as label

I would like to thank @YuviPanda: ,@Planemad: and folks on #wikidata, #pywikibot to help me out through this. Would love to hear the thoughts and feedbacks from the community on how this could be more useful to help the community of translators.  – The preceding unsigned comment was added by Amishas157 (talk • contribs) at 13:14, 21 December 2016‎ (UTC).

For some reason Hazard-Bot can't archive this section, closing it manually. --Lockal (talk) 19:03, 22 February 2017 (UTC)
This section was archived on a request by: --Pasleim (talk) 09:20, 24 February 2017 (UTC)

what to do about user edit-warring based on trying to force the item label to exactly match the linked enwp article title (and then on sarcasm)?

Where/how can I deal with this? New user Succu has twice renamed galaxy group or cluster (Q17512228) to "galaxy groups and clusters", first saying it was because it needed to match the linked enwp article title and that I should change that instead if I "don't like it", and then when I explained why (I believe) it doesn't work that way, he reverted me again saying "now it does". DavRosen (talk) 23:37, 16 February 2017 (UTC)

@DavRosen: User:Succu is by no means new to Wikidata since his talk page archive goes back four years; you are most certainly the newer user (for the most part) given your ~3.5 year hiatus in editing and lack of discussion on your talk page. These differences notwithstanding, I am inclined to support the singular formation you suggested since it makes statements like instance of (P31) "galaxy group or cluster" more elegant. This need not be a complaint about the behavior of other users when it could just be a discussion of plural forms in labels for items representing classes. Mahir256 (talk) 05:31, 17 February 2017 (UTC)
Succu is plain wrong. We do not keep an incorrect item just because there is an article in any language. When the article is singular, we do not need an item. Thanks, GerardM (talk) 05:51, 17 February 2017 (UTC)
Anyway, what does this article add to the Wikidata data model? Can't we just use galaxy group (Q1491746) and galaxy cluster (Q204107) to represent what we need? instance of (P31) galaxy group or cluster (Q17512228) does not look correct anyway, be it singular or plural.Koxinga (talk) 06:49, 17 February 2017 (UTC)
I simply wasn't sure what to do next because I didn't want to engage in an edit war by reverting again, and after I pointed out that we don't need to change the en wp article title in order to change the wd label because that's not the way WD works, he did one more reversion with "That's now how it works..." which I presumed did not really mean that a policy dicussion or change had actually occurred recently, so it was by definition a sarcastic (or at least ironic) statement, and in any case gave the strong impression that he was reverting it repeatedly to force it to be the same as the article title no matter whether it was a good practice or not. That suggested to me that there was no point in further discussion with Succu on the merits of the article title, which is why I wasn't sure what to do next.
@Mahir256:, I simply mistakenly thought (in good faith) that Succu was a new user (I'd thought I'd checked) and I only mentioned it out of consideration for Succu so that none of us would "bite a newcomer", not to be dismissive of Succu's standing to disagree with us or me, nor to claim or assert how long I myself might have been editing. So there is really no need to assume bad faith on my part and so to discuss how long I, personally, have been or have not been editing WD (compared to Succu or anyone else), unless you're concerned yourself in good faith that I myself might be vulnerable to "bites", in which case... then I do appreciate the consideration.
In any case, I think we can now keep the focus solely on the question about galaxy cluster (Q204107): whether it should exist at all, and in general or in this case whether it is good WD modeling practice to use a singular label for a class of singular instances (each being a galaxy in this case), and incidentally whether to use the the "or" in the label at least when there is a union statement making it clear that any instance of this is an instance of one or the other subclass.
I'm going to revert the label back to the singular, based on the discussion above, and a third or fourth party can always revert it back again if we're mistaken, or delete it if that were the consensus.
BTW, I'm just curious, in the event that the item is ever deleted, would it be a good idea in such a case to switch the wp links to one or the other of the remaining subclasses appearing in the union statement (or perhaps to an appropriate superclass if there is one?), or just let the links disappear (which would of course remove the other-language links on the WP article as well as the wd label appearing at the top of each article in the mobile wp app) ? I have no idea what's usually done in such a situation.
DavRosen (talk) 14:14, 17 February 2017 (UTC)
As general rules:
  • No rule can force to use the article title of a defined WP. WD is not WP and has different rules (granularity, notability,...)
  • This is a general rule in ontology to use singular form for labels. Unless the item is representing a concept which can be used only in the plural form like Immortals (Q213165). Snipre (talk) 15:55, 17 February 2017 (UTC)
  • Snipre: Exactly. (BTW is there a help doc I can point others to that says this?) And do you also agree that "or" should be used in an item's label if it is made up of names of two subclasses of which the item is a union? In this case "galaxy group or cluster" Q17512228 contains a claim stating (correctly) that it is the union of "group of galaxies" with "galaxy cluster", which means it should not be "galaxy group and cluster".DavRosen (talk) 16:41, 17 February 2017 (UTC)
DavRosen External reference can help but WD should create its own set of rules based on best practises and according to its own targets as ontology. But a reference can be "Building Ontologies with Basic Formal Ontology", R. Arp, B. Smith, A. D. Spear, MIT Press, 2015, p. 61-62 (see here).
You can cite this document too, in page 12, where it is specified "A common modeling mistake is to include both a singular and a plural version of the sameconcept in the hierarchy making the former a subclass of the latter." See section 6 for more discussion.
Using only singular or plural prevent the creation of 2 items for the same concept, one in the singular form and the other in the plural form. Snipre (talk) 21:31, 17 February 2017 (UTC)
Snipre, Help:Label states nothing about naming conventions for items we regard as classes. --Succu (talk) 20:10, 17 February 2017 (UTC)
Succu, just apply the principle of heredity
* Panthera is a subclass of Pantherinae
* Pantherinae is a subclass of Felidae
* Felidae is a subclass of Feliformia
...
* Chordata is a subclass of Animal
So Bagheera (Q1860030) is an instance of Panthera, an instance of Pantherinae, an instance of Felidae, an instance of Feliformia,..., an instance of Chordata and an instance of animal. Snipre (talk) 21:17, 17 February 2017 (UTC)
This is not an answer to my question (naming conventions for items we regard as classes) and BTW wrong. --Succu (talk) 21:20, 17 February 2017 (UTC)
Succu What was the question ? I didn't see any question mark in your last coment. Your sentence was an affirmation and even if something is not explicitly defined it doesn't mean it's wrong.
What's wrong ? You as human are not a mammal ? You are an instance of human and an instance of Homo sapiens, an instance of mammal, an instance of animal,... and an instance of plenty of other things. Snipre (talk) 21:42, 17 February 2017 (UTC)
Really? Sure I'm an ape, but your answer did not match my observation that „Help:Label states nothing about naming conventions for items we regard as classes.“ Bagheera (Q1860030) is an instance of fictional panther (Q21009855) and we can't model taxonomic hierarchies as a monohierarchy--Succu (talk) 21:53, 17 February 2017 (UTC)
Succu Ok, so try to show what is wrong if you replace Bagheera (Q1860030) with Leopard of Rudraprayag (Q3393547) ? Is it still wrong ? And by the way can you show me how you can define yourself as ape ? You are an instance of Homo sapiens and ape are instances of Pan paniscus (for example) so you aren't an ape. But you are an instance of Hominidae and ape too. Snipre (talk) 22:14, 18 February 2017 (UTC)
So again you omitted my Help:Label problem which is responsible for this threat, not very helpful.
What happens when some new research finds out that leopard (Q34706) should be place in the new genus Neopanthera? Is it still correct to state that the individual Leopard of Rudraprayag (Q3393547) is an instance of Panthera pardus?
The usage of common names is allways problematic as your other question shows. So how do you define the term „ape“ (=„Affe“)? Should it applied to Simiiformes (Q5452918) or Hominoidea (Q102470)? I think declaring me to be an instance of (individual, particular) bonobo (Q19537) would be ridiculous.
--Succu (talk) 23:27, 18 February 2017 (UTC)
I think Snipre is right about the principle, and Succu is right that it would be very helpful if this were documented in the Help. Something like this for starters?
  • The label of a class should be written as if it described a singular generic instance of the class being labeled. E.g. the class of all stars should be called "star" as its label. And if it were desirable to have a class describing all beeps as well as all burps then it could be called "beep or burp" because each instance is indeed either a beep or a burp.
DavRosen (talk) 21:37, 17 February 2017 (UTC)
If the item in question is a union (Q17853087) / union (Q185359) why should that labeled with or which denotes that one part is optional? --Succu (talk) 22:02, 17 February 2017 (UTC)
That's not what "or" denotes here. "galaxy group or cluster" is is literally nothing but a label that correctly applies to every instance of the class individually. Every individual instance of the class is a galaxy group or a galaxy cluster (perhaps both but that's a separate question of whether it's a distinct union or merely a union). There might be no instances (class might be empty) if each instance was required to be a galaxy group AND a galaxy cluster.DavRosen (talk) 22:17, 17 February 2017 (UTC)

described at URL (P973)

Should this property be used for any URL that discusses the item? For example, in the case of a person, should all online biographies of that person be included in this property? Or should it be applied more narrowly? Nikkimaria (talk) 01:03, 19 February 2017 (UTC)

the description on the property's talk page says "This is to be used to provide links to external resources that are not the item's official website, when no relevant "authority control" property exists (for instance, because the website is too messy)" – The preceding unsigned comment was added by Billinghurst (talk • contribs) at 19. 2. 2017, 04:39‎ (UTC).

Wikiproject Finnish elections

1. We are starting to prepare the import of the candidates for the Finnish municipal elections in the new Wikiproject Finnish Elections. While the import of the candidates is the main issue and needs to tackle several challenges, I would like to ask for your assistance in making sense of municipal council items in Wikidata. Currently there is municipal council in Finland (Q191893), which is a subclass of municipal council (Q701632), which is a subclass of city council (Q3154693). Any way that could be sorted out? – Susanna Ånäs (Susannaanas) (talk) 08:15, 3 February 2017 (UTC)

Yes, this could be really difficult. One of the more difficult properties to agree around is office contested (P541). In many elections, you vote for the "seats in the city/municipal council". The mayor and other officies, are thereafter indirectly elected by the council. I do not know how it works in Suomi, but that is how it works here in Ruotsi. P541 is still often used for other things than these "seats".
One challenge I have notified is that we here in Ruotsi are not only voting for individual persons, but also for political parties. That is also difficult to describe. (The sum of all votes therefor exceeds the total # of votes.) And on local level, it is not unusual that persons that are not a member of a political party are representing a party. The lists of potential candidates are often endless, since people can vote on almost anything, including Donald Duck (Q6550) and "free alcohol and wider pavements". -- Innocent bystander (talk) 13:58, 3 February 2017 (UTC)
Really happy that you answered! I am sure we are tackling much the same questions in Finland and Sverige. I am more or less confident that all the parts will fall into place well enough. I am hoping not to create unnecessary connectors, such as municipal council 2012–2017 in Helsinki, even though I already was tempted to. There are still unknown objects, such as constituency association (Q10712411) for elections (do they exist more globally?), joint list or constituency association (Q11902699) coalitions between constituency association (Q10712411), or electoral alliance (Q388602) between parties (should they be declared on a municipal or national level) who all establish candidate lists. I have not yet found an item for the list. In Finland, the votes are counted with D'Hondt method (Q337866), and the correlation between the votes and the elected persons is not direct. A key problem is which items should have instances for different years or municipalities etc. We plan to import all candidates if everything goes well. Votes cast on other than the candidates is an issue that we don't necessarily tackle. Any help regarding any of these question will be warmheartedly welcomed! Perhaps the best place will be the project page. Cheers, Susanna Ånäs (Susannaanas) (talk) 14:56, 3 February 2017 (UTC)
I have planned to use office contested (P541) to express that the candidates are running for the council item rather than the individual representative item. If it poses no computational harm, I propose the scope of the object of the property be extended to cover a legislature as well. – Susanna Ånäs (Susannaanas) (talk) 09:51, 4 February 2017 (UTC)
@Susannaanas: Can you give an example of what this would look like? --Oravrattas (talk) 20:57, 4 February 2017 (UTC)
@Oravrattas: I have created an example on the project page. It should already have the most important features, but generally everything is in the making. – Susanna Ånäs (Susannaanas) (talk) 22:36, 4 February 2017 (UTC)
@Susannaanas:. Great, thanks! Based on this, I don't think that extending the scope of office contested (P541) to allow something like Helsinki City Council (Q4117101) is the right way to go. Instead I would suggest creating a separate "position" entity for "Member of the City Council of Helsinki" (or equivalent), similarly to how this is modelled for members of all national legislatures (see, for example, the list at Wikidata:EveryPolitician) --Oravrattas (talk) 09:48, 5 February 2017 (UTC)
@Oravrattas: Thanks! If you think that this would be the right way to go, I will then add the 311 items that this requires for Finland, plus the historical ones. I would also urgently need discussion on the candidacy in election -proposal. I wish you could spare a thought! – Susanna Ånäs (Susannaanas) (talk) 10:10, 5 February 2017 (UTC)
@Oravrattas:I am not very happy with this but I will follow this. I still need a linking property from the local municipal elections to the local city council. It seems arbitrary to link through the candidate/representative. – Susanna Ånäs (Susannaanas) (talk) 08:51, 9 February 2017 (UTC)
@Susannaanas: I'm not sure I understand. The linking to the body is through the office, not through the candidate:
Note also that this is only needs to be set on the 'parent' concept rather than on each individual election, so in the UK is actually
and is only added to the individual election if it needs to be more specific — e.g. on 2015 United Kingdom general election (Q3586935), office contested (P541) has a qualfier of parliamentary term (P2937): 56th Parliament of the United Kingdom (Q21084473) --Oravrattas (talk) 06:31, 10 February 2017 (UTC)
@Oravrattas: Thanks for the answer, and sorry for being unclear. I should have said representative rather than candidate. I have created the following object, misusing the office contested (P541) property. When we locate a suitable property, we will replace this. I hope that these statements would not be removed until replacing ones can be written. I have also create related municipality and municipal council items, as well as the item for the elections nationally. – Susanna Ånäs (Susannaanas) (talk) 14:40, 12 February 2017 (UTC)
@Susannaanas: I've tweaked that slightly to show one potential way you could do it, if you don't want to create a new Item for "Member of Alavus City Council" (though I suspect that creating such items will be better in the long term). --Oravrattas (talk) 12:09, 13 February 2017 (UTC)
@Oravrattas: I like that! The term showing up in the Finnish translation is not a correct one, so I will need to check if it's the right item, but if not I'll just change it. Thanks! – Susanna Ånäs (Susannaanas) (talk) 13:53, 13 February 2017 (UTC)

2. I am realizing that candidates are a property of the elections rather than vice-versa. If we have tens of thousands of candidates that model is not sustainable. Is there an existing model for defining it in reverse or should it be created? – Susanna Ånäs (Susannaanas) (talk) 16:11, 3 February 2017 (UTC)

I have reopened the proposal for an inverse property of candidate (P726), see candidacy in election – Susanna Ånäs (Susannaanas) (talk) 09:51, 4 February 2017 (UTC)

3. I think an inverse property is also needed for number of seats in assembly (P1410) to be able to sensibly list all the seats of a municipal council by party rather than list all the seats in all the municipal councils in the party item. If it exists, I would be happy if you let me know! – Cheers, Susanna Ånäs (Susannaanas) (talk) 09:51, 4 February 2017 (UTC)

4. Which property to use for the candidate number? Is a new one needed? It would probably be a qualifier to the candidate (P726) / candidacy property. – Susanna Ånäs (Susannaanas) (talk) 10:08, 4 February 2017 (UTC)

No I do not think you should merge constituency association (Q10712411) with anything. Au contraire, we should probably create more items like this.
What is a "candidate number"? It looks like you in Suomi have to nominate a candidate, and only "approved" candidates can get a valid vote?! (Here you can be elected without a nomination or even have approved it yourself. That has happened to Thomas Wassberg (Q195578) at least two times I think.)
The models for how the seats are distributed are often very complex. The model for Swedish elections, are in many cases not a clean version of any of these models, since constituencies and leveling seats make the math rather complex. -- Innocent bystander (talk) 13:10, 5 February 2017 (UTC)
Yes, parties or constituency association (Q10712411) can nominate candidates, which results in candidate lists for each party / association / alliance in each municipality. The candidate has a number in this list. This is one modelling problem: Which property to use for the number, and should I also make an item for the candidate list(s)? If I use the number already as a qualifier for the candidacy then I have no more means to add the list as a qualifier to the number. – Susanna Ånäs (Susannaanas) (talk) 14:42, 5 February 2017 (UTC)

Thanks for help and discussions! The hackathon at Yle was successful, with over 30 (data) journalists taking part and learning to use Wikidata. We will gather our observations on the project page as well as links to hackathon outcomes and future plans. The data import has still a lot of cleaning and fixing to do, and we hope to be well prepared for this years election data in April. – Susanna Ånäs (Susannaanas) (talk) 14:26, 19 February 2017 (UTC)

NoBounds constraint for quantity-type properties

We have ~340 properties with quantity type. Can we have a new constraint template for this property type to indicate that a particular property typically should not or must not be used with bounds (i.e. amount only)? The concept of uncertainty does not apply for all quantities, thus bounds have been made optional recently. Right now we have plenty of bounds in our claims just because it was inevitable to add them, it might be useful to tidy them via covi pages. —MisterSynergy (talk) 15:37, 15 February 2017 (UTC)

To push this once: who is working in the field of constraint definitions? Alternatively to a new constraint type, we could also use Complex Constraints with a somewhat simple SPARQL query such as this one for VAT rate (P2855):
SELECT ?item { ?item p:P2855 [ psv:P2855 [ wikibase:quantityLowerBound ?lowerBound; wikibase:quantityUpperBound ?upperBound ] ] . }
Try it!
I think it is important to distinguish between quantities for which there simply is no uncertainty (which are mostly not determined by physical measurements, VAT rate (P2855) is an example) and properties with (possible) uncertainty and therefore bounds (which might be 0). We also distinguish between no value and concept of no-value in Wikibase (Q19798647) (or other similar NULL-like custom values). —MisterSynergy (talk) 09:35, 19 February 2017 (UTC)

WikiProject Germany has now a participant list

I created a participant list for WikiProject Germany following the example of Thierry Caro creating lists for the Anglophone countries.

I think it would be worthwhile if we have Wikiproject participant lists for most countries to be able to ping relevant people. Especially if you speak languages that aren't well represented, I encourage you to create a Wikiproject. ChristianKl (talk) 09:10, 17 February 2017 (UTC)

Yes, this would be helpful. Thierry Caro (talk) 11:14, 19 February 2017 (UTC)

Called to the bar

Do we have a property for "called to the bar"? The value would be a single date. - PKM (talk) 22:21, 18 February 2017 (UTC)

You could look in to using significant event (P793) with the value call to the bar (Q5021687) and date as a qualifier. Danrok (talk) 02:24, 19 February 2017 (UTC)
Perfect, thank you. - PKM (talk) 03:01, 19 February 2017 (UTC)
@PKM: I have usually been adding them as "member of" then adding the requisite Inn with a start date.  — billinghurst sDrewth 04:35, 19 February 2017 (UTC)
@billinghurst:Would "member of" an Inn of Court imply having been called to the bar rather than just studying there? This isn't my area of specialization, would love to know. That sounds like a good solution if so. - PKM (talk) 06:56, 19 February 2017 (UTC)
@PKM: They were usually firstly students at an Inn, then members, before being called to the bar. It was/is a process where being called is the end of the 'apprenticeship' and qualified. Poke at some of the finished transcriptions in s:Men-at-the-Bar (1885) to see numbers of (historical) examples.  — billinghurst sDrewth 07:24, 19 February 2017 (UTC)
@billinghurst: Thanks, will do! - PKM (talk) 07:28, 19 February 2017 (UTC)

Order of presentation for a person

Hoi, I think that having won an award is more relevant than being nominated for an award. So I prefer it when the order is reversed and "award received" comes first. Thanks, GerardM (talk) 11:13, 16 February 2017 (UTC)

I agree. Maybe it makes sense to create a phabricator ticket? ChristianKl (talk) 21:15, 19 February 2017 (UTC)

How to handle apocryphal people and biographies, similarly apocryphal events and their accounts

Through transcribing A biographical dictionary of eminent Scotsmen, 1857 (Q19020079) it is evident that some of the articles are doubtful for actual people. I am looking for guidance how we should be dealing with the subjects of such articles. For people they should not be "human", as they did not exist, we could call them "fictional character" though that doesn't ring true to me either. As apocryphal works can be about people (apocryphal person), or events (apocryphal event), or we could amalgamate and have "apocryphal subject", "doubtful subject" or something someone else can think to cover this matter. Also, as these biographical materials given detail about the supposed person, how much do we see that we could or should have? Thanks for your thoughts.

The first set of biographical articles will be added when I finish the first volume (soon), and I feel that I need to have a "main subject" link to something, especially where some of these identified had the same issue in the DNB00.  — billinghurst sDrewth 02:44, 18 February 2017 (UTC)

How about simply creating a new "apocryphal person" item? ChristianKl (talk) 07:17, 18 February 2017 (UTC)
definitely an option considered, though that would lead to people adding dates, and other classifying items, and that may not be the communities wish, hence why the issue is being mentioned.  — billinghurst sDrewth 07:37, 18 February 2017 (UTC)
There is human whose existence is disputed (Q21070568), which may be what you need? It is already used for characters in the Bible for example.Koxinga (talk) 08:48, 18 February 2017 (UTC)
Thanks. So different item, otherwise treat the same as a human.  — billinghurst sDrewth 09:42, 18 February 2017 (UTC)
Ah. Duplicate of Koxinga's comment. Sorry. Jheald (talk) 12:38, 18 February 2017 (UTC)

@billinghurst: I have created a new item: apocryphal biographical entry (Q28801354), and made it a subclass of both fictitious entry (Q1417174) and human whose existence is disputed (Q21070568). Hopefully this can be of some use here!--Pharos (talk) 04:03, 19 February 2017 (UTC)

@Pharos: I am not certain that it is helpful. While I am happy to label the underlying person as apocryphal as that is the evidence from later analysis by scholars. The article itself is still a biographical article in a biographical work, and I do not see that it is our call to make a differentiation of a published work. Maybe, (and I am not convinced) we could qualify the item for "biographical article", putting something else is another matter, and not one that I wish to do.  — billinghurst sDrewth 04:28, 19 February 2017 (UTC)
@billinghurst: I'm confused, are you creating Wikidata items for every individual entry in the biographical dictionary, rather than an item for the dictionary or for the people themselves? Can you link an example?--Pharos (talk) 04:56, 19 February 2017 (UTC)
I will be creating an item for each entry, as each entry is a subpage at enWS. This has been the practice for many biographical and encyclopaedic works for numbers of WSes. The work has its own item. Picking an existing biographical article at random as an example Church, Richard William (Q19037309).  — billinghurst sDrewth 05:17, 19 February 2017 (UTC)
@billinghurst: Thanks for the information on Wikisource subpages, wasn't fully aware of that system. Wouldn't a questionable entry in that case just be an instance of fictitious entry (Q1417174) (in addition to being biographical article (Q19389637))?--Pharos (talk) 00:22, 20 February 2017 (UTC)
Fictitious would be a deliberate act, that is a big call. That modern day sources, or lack of access to older sources, are unable to confirm a person's existence doesn't make an entry fictitious. Am I, a humble transcriber of other people's work, not an authority, able to make that judgement call? The article is the article as it was printed at that time, it is what it is. Maybe I could follow your process if we have a process to dispute any published article recorded within WD where it has been authoritatively proved wrong (sourcing required), or other interpretations have followed (sourcing required), it still is opinion/interpretation that you are putting on against an item, and that is not related to the item. It is a slippery slope to do that to articles. The person item is a different matter, that is an amalgam of information that has a chronology, and is able to show and represent disputative information.  — billinghurst sDrewth 04:10, 20 February 2017 (UTC)

Citing Oxford DNB

I'm struggling with sourcing statements to Oxford DNB online. If the person has an Oxford DNB number as an authority, I assume individual statements still need sources. What's the best practice here? Should those be "reference URL" to the online site, or "stated in" Oxford DNB, or what? I have a bunch I did wrong so I want to fix them correctly. Thanks! - PKM (talk) 22:18, 18 February 2017 (UTC)

  • I believe the preference is to give both. (Though I'm happy to be corrected). Jheald (talk) 23:04, 18 February 2017 (UTC)
  • Help:Sources describes different source models, of which Database and Web Page are relevant here. One would typically choose the Database approach if there is a database (as in this case), but there is no obligation to do so. Mixed sources which fit both models are also possible, but somewhat expensive to add. —MisterSynergy (talk) 23:08, 18 February 2017 (UTC)
Thanks. I read that and looked at some examples. It seems that "stated in" Oxford Biography Index should work. - PKM (talk) 03:58, 19 February 2017 (UTC)
Please also add all the other information to each individual reference, as Help:Sources suggests. There are some gadgets available which help you to work in this field a little more efficiently (DuplicateReferences, CurrentDate, …) —MisterSynergy (talk) 06:17, 19 February 2017 (UTC)
I'm sorry, I don't see how to add qualifiers to a reference. Can you point me to an example of a reference to a database that is done in the manner recommended? - PKM (talk) 07:25, 19 February 2017 (UTC)
Q24005810#P569. There are three different referenced values for the date of birth of this person. Two are referenced by three different databases (which therefore usse the database source model), and another one has a reference with the web page model. The order of the claims within each reference does not matter, it is just important that all important information is there within each reference individually.
If you were to retrieve data including a reference from Wikidata, e.g. in a Wikipedia module or template, you’d need to rely on the fact that all the important source information as defined by some standard (here: Help:Sources) is found in each reference. It was very difficult for Wikipedia to build a useful source if Wikidata just said “stated in: some database”, without giving a database ID, a retrieval date, and an external database entry title (the latter is relevant since there is not necessarily a 1:1 mapping between Wikidata items and external database entries). A simple “reference URL: some URL” would be not as bad, but still clearly below Wikipedia standard. —MisterSynergy (talk) 07:47, 19 February 2017 (UTC)

┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘ @MisterSynergy: Thank you, that is just what I needed. Now I know how to proceed! - PKM (talk) 20:13, 19 February 2017 (UTC)

British History Online VCH ID

As can be seen at Wikidata:Property proposal/British History Online VCH ID, Andrew Gray, Charles Matthews, James Heald and I were recently involved in a cordial discussion about how best to represent topics mentioned in Victoria County History (Q7926668), for which I had proposed a property.

To my surprise, before we reached a conclusion, this was marked as ready and, shortly afterwards, British History Online VCH ID (P3628) was created.

Two points arise:

  1. Please can property creators and others be more mindful of ongoing discussions?
  2. What's the best solution regarding VCH? Please discuss at Property talk:P3628#Way forward

@YULdigitalpreservation, ArthurPSmith, ChristianKl: also. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 10:16, 19 February 2017 (UTC)

I'm sorry. The discussion looked to me like it reached it's conclusion. User:Jheald answered the open issues and nobody opposed the property in it's current form. ChristianKl (talk) 17:14, 19 February 2017 (UTC)
Note I marked it as ready after reading JHeald's "Latest view" comment, it seemed the discussion had concluded. ArthurPSmith (talk) 16:28, 20 February 2017 (UTC)

Items for school year & academic term were merged

Q1757373, which did have the English label "school year", has been redirected to academic year (Q915466), which has the English label "academic term". Given that there are (usually) three terms in a year, should they be de-merged, or were the English labels wrong?

@Infovarius: FYI. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 14:55, 20 February 2017 (UTC)

I think it should be de-merged. In German "Schuljahr" wouldn't be used for an university. ChristianKl (talk) 15:47, 20 February 2017 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #248

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Development
    • Making final fixes to initial version of Federation (needed to be able to use Wikidata items and properties to describe media on Commons in the future)
    • More work on baseline for Lexeme entity type for Wiktionary support
    • Fixed an error on d:Special:ConstraintReport (phabricator:T158183)
    • Wikidata Query Service got additional servers, the data has been reloaded to fix a number of issues caused by missed updates and an increase of the time-out of 30s is being looked into.

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here.


Lighting

As user:JayWacker points out on the former's talk page, artificial light (Q138502) and lighting (Q210064) look very similar. However, links to different articles on the German, Spanish, Italian and other Wikipedias. Perhaps they need better English labels and descriptions? Can someone who speaks one or more of those languages please oblige? Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 09:58, 19 February 2017 (UTC)

  • Now I see your point—I did not watch these items. The concept of “opposites” does not have a clear definition which allows to contest a given opposite relation for correctness. The distinction between artificial light (Q138502) and daylight (Q16491) has basically a technical motivation, not a physical one; we can thus neglect that there might be other, technically not relevant parts of light in an another physical context (e.g. extraterrestrial radiation). But here both types complement to the total light (Q9128), while being in fact totally disjunct types of light. Yes, an opposite of (P461) relation seems appropriate to my opinion. —MisterSynergy (talk) 22:52, 20 February 2017 (UTC)

executive body (P208): "government" or "cabinet"?

The documentation for executive body (P208) (Property_talk:P208) gives as its example Israel (Q801) → cabinet of Israel (Q2578249). However, it also has an "Allowed values" constraint of executive branch (Q35798), and cabinet of Israel (Q2578249) (as well as most other countries where the Cabinet, rather than the Government is set as the value) fails this check (Wikidata:Database_reports/Constraint_violations/P208#Value_type_Q35798), as the item is usually a subclass of cabinet (Q640506) (with individual Cabinets being instances of that), rather than a direct instance of cabinet (Q640506).

From what I can see, many of these countries don't have a separate item for the national government, distinct from the Cabinet, but some countries do: e.g. the UK has Government of the United Kingdom (Q6063) of which Cabinet of the United Kingdom (Q112014) is a part, and United States Cabinet (Q639738) is a part of Federal Government of the United States (Q48525).

Surveying how this is used generally isn't a lot of help — most countries don't have executive body (P208) set yet at all, and of those that do, there's a slight preference for the "cabinet" rather than the "government", but the numbers are small enough for it to be inconclusive: 

SELECT DISTINCT ?country ?countryLabel ?body ?bodyLabel ?parentLabel
WHERE {
  ?country wdt:P31 wd:Q6256 .     # find instances of country
  OPTIONAL {
    ?country p:P208 ?statement .  # with a P208 (government) statement
    ?statement ps:P208 ?body .    # which we assign as ?body
    FILTER NOT EXISTS { ?statement pq:P582 ?end_date }  # with no P582 (end date) qualifier
    OPTIONAL { ?body wdt:P279 ?parent } # and set ?parent based on either subclass
    OPTIONAL { ?body wdt:P31 ?parent }  #                          or instance of
  }
  SERVICE wikibase:label { bd:serviceParam wikibase:language "en" . }
}
ORDER BY ?countryLabel
Try it!

I'm assuming that it's generally a bad idea if the example given for a Property fails one of its primary constraints. Is the solution here to (a) change the constraint to allow a Cabinet (either exclusively, or in addition to a Government); (b) change how cabinets are modelled, so that they can be set here without this constraint failing; (c) make sure this is set to the Government item, not the Cabinet item in each country (creating the relevant items where needed); (d) something else entirely?

Or from another angle, which should we be saying?:

⟨ United States of America (Q30)  View with Reasonator View with SQID ⟩ executive body (P208) View with SQID ⟨ United States Cabinet (Q639738)  View with Reasonator View with SQID ⟩

or

⟨ United States of America (Q30)  View with Reasonator View with SQID ⟩ executive body (P208) View with SQID ⟨ Federal Government of the United States (Q48525)  View with Reasonator View with SQID ⟩

--Oravrattas (talk) 16:46, 20 February 2017 (UTC)

well it sounds like at least the subclass/instance modeling here is wrong. But I'm not sure what else I would recommend. ArthurPSmith (talk) 17:10, 20 February 2017 (UTC)
 Comment Oh, it looks like we have a mixture of terms in place, the synonym here needs to be removed. The body here is meant to be government and it is meant to exclude branch. Looking at what is around, a nice definition is
the executive (the Australian Government) is responsible for enacting and upholding the laws established by the legislature. Certain members of the legislature (called ministers) are also members of the executive, with special responsibilities for certain areas of the law.
—source, http://www.australia.gov.au/about-government/how-government-works
and it separately mentions the legislature and the courts as the other two arms.  — billinghurst sDrewth 22:42, 20 February 2017 (UTC)
as a slight aside, that definition is quite specific to the British/Australian-type system. Much of the world maintains a much stronger separation of powers, where a minister cannot also be a member of the legislature. --Oravrattas (talk) 09:55, 21 February 2017 (UTC)

TRAPPIST-1

The interface isn't allowing corrections.

  • Q23986556 (TRAPPIST-1) has commonswiki CATEGORY:TRAPPIST-1

but this should be indicated at

since that is the category data page

I can't add the category to the category data page, nor can I remove it from the article data page

-- 70.51.200.162 07:46, 24 February 2017 (UTC)

✓ Done I moved the sitelink. --Pasleim (talk) 09:19, 24 February 2017 (UTC)
This section was archived on a request by: Matěj Suchánek (talk) 13:38, 27 February 2017 (UTC)

Cannot add an article for interwiki

Somehow, I cannot add w:he:צִבְעוֹנִיִּים to Q59905. The software says it doesn't exist but I'm definitely looking at it. Does anyone know why it reads "A page "צִבְעוֹנִיִּים" could not be found on "hewiki".

The external client site "hewiki" did not provide page information for page "צִבְעוֹנִיִּים"." —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 19:13, 26 February 2017 (UTC)
The page צִבְעוֹנִיִּים does not exist. Perhaps you typed something wrong? MechQuester (talk) 19:27, 26 February 2017 (UTC)
@MechQuester: Sorry, thanks. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 19:51, 26 February 2017 (UTC)
This section was archived on a request by: Matěj Suchánek (talk) 13:38, 27 February 2017 (UTC)

Ethnic communities and diasporas

Italian Americans (Q974693) and similar items are not really ethnic groups, so I've made this an instance of the newly-created ethnic community (Q28790362). On another level, I have also been developing Overseas Chinese (Q779191) and African diaspora (Q385967) as instances of diaspora (Q133004) items. What do folks think of this approach of distinguishing between ethnic groups, national/regional ethnic communities, and diasporas?--Pharos (talk) 15:43, 16 February 2017 (UTC)

@MechQuester, Billinghurst, TomT0m, Jc3s5h, Sjoerddebruin: Realizing now this is a bit of a sequel to Wikidata:Project chat/Archive/2017/01#Irish-American - is it an instance of ethnic group?.--Pharos (talk) 18:55, 16 February 2017 (UTC)
There was another related discussion here at WD:PC (archived here). Let’s put it like that: we know that the situation about ethnic group items and property ethnic group (P172) is not good, but right now there is unfortunately nobody willing and/or capable to solve this problem. If you’d like to work in this field, I think nobody will complain. You also might find a suitable WikiProject at Wikidata:WikiProjects (or found a new one, to provide documentation of the results). —MisterSynergy (talk) 20:18, 16 February 2017 (UTC)
For wikidata to try to make sense of people's sense of community, self, ethnicity, ... is going to be a challenge as it is full of opinion, prejudice, history, ... In a world of air flights, refugees, asylum-seeking, immigration, one wonders whether it is an old world view if we are applying it to the now; though probably realistic for dealing with the old world. All I can say is good luck.  — billinghurst sDrewth 22:46, 16 February 2017 (UTC)

For proposed data, I don't mind. In fact, itis good. In this world, I agree with billinghurst. There will be massively different opinions on what defines self-identity. MechQuester (talk) 18:34, 18 February 2017 (UTC)

I've made attempt to start a guideline at Wikidata:WikiProject Ethnicity, your input would be welcomed. I see this as more figuring out how to treat types of ethnicity in a meta way, rather than trying to categorize individuals.--Pharos (talk) 05:20, 19 February 2017 (UTC)
Agreed. I will go out to help out. MechQuester (talk) 05:56, 22 February 2017 (UTC)

Commons data file property

It seems to me that there is no property to link to the data files in Commons, the .tab JSON files and the .map GeoJSON files? If that is the case, I could propose a property for at least the map file. – Susanna Ånäs (Susannaanas) (talk) 15:14, 19 February 2017 (UTC)

The corresponding datatype to link to the data namespace on Commons is not yet available. --Pasleim (talk) 14:35, 20 February 2017 (UTC)
@Pasleim: Is that datatype expected to be coming soon? Or would a property with datatype:string and a URL formatter be useful in the meantime? Jheald (talk) 21:16, 20 February 2017 (UTC)
Based on the comments on phabricator:T57549 I guess the datatype will come soon. --Pasleim (talk) 22:40, 21 February 2017 (UTC)

Facebook

There is now a Community for Wikidata editors on Facebook. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 23:46, 21 February 2017 (UTC)

Single value constraint

The property Thailand central administrative unit code (P1067) has as one of its constraints the single-value constraint (Q19474404). However, what it actually would need is a constraint which checks that there is only one value in the highest used rank - there can be only one current id for each administrative subdivision, however there can be several old discontinued ids. For example, Mueang Bueng Kan (Q476000) has the current id 3801 and until 2011 had the id 4303, and as the constraint checks over all ranks this is listed as one of the constraint violations. Any ideas what to do, other than ignoring the violations or removing the constraint completely? Ahoerstemeier (talk) 17:46, 16 February 2017 (UTC)

+1. I can't offer a general solution, but I do agree that constraint checks (especially single-value constraint (Q19474404)) should ignore deprecated statements. (Or at least that should be their default behaviour). I don't know how to fix the central constraint checker, but it should be easy enough to write a SPARQL query that only looks at the wdt: values. Jheald (talk) 23:34, 16 February 2017 (UTC)
For example, like this query. (Currently doesn't find any).
I think you can register a SPARQL query as a "complex constraint" Jheald (talk) 23:42, 16 February 2017 (UTC)
Deprecated statements really should always be ignored, as this is the way to include "false" statements. However, that'd not help in this case, as old values aren't deprecated, they are just outdated, thus having a end time and rank "normal", whereas the current value has highest rank. Thus there can be more than a single value in the lower ranks, as an example I added to Bung Khla (Q17616122) all old values. Ahoerstemeier (talk) 14:38, 17 February 2017 (UTC)
May be better to ping User:Ivan A. Krestinin? --Infovarius (talk) 10:14, 22 February 2017 (UTC)

How many new users get auto-patrolled every month?

I'm thinking about the suggestion made by @Alexmar983: to manually give users auto-patrolled status along with a personalized human-written welcome message. Does anybody know how many people get this status every month? (To estimate the amount of work of giving the status along with a manual welcome message. ChristianKl (talk) 18:40, 18 February 2017 (UTC)

Per Wikidata:Requests for comment/Restructuring of the "minor" user rights, all and only autoconfirmed and confirmed users are autopatrolled. Autoconfirmed users are users registered for 4 days and had 50 edits. Admins may give any user confirmed flags if trusted.--GZWDer (talk) 18:48, 18 February 2017 (UTC)
the problem is that you are giving autopatrolled flag to people who simply have 99% (95%? 90%? i don't how how to crunch the number...) of the time simple "interlink" edits. Those people are sometimes unaware of the fact that wikidata has IDs, labels and so one. I have problems with long-term users that criticize me when I start to explain wikidata from its role of centralizations of links but that's the only aspect they usually know. When they start to make other changes (for example they try to understand how a local infobox connected to wikidata works) who is there to teach them? I am no stressing the "they can make a mistake" part. I also did a stupid mistake of a image few weeks ago and I corrected after few hours (and noone noticed BTW). I am sorry about the opportunity of learning from mistakes that is lost. They could do so much more if someone see them. They can understand that their work in ns0 somewhere else is on that item too. And once they understand they really care. One of the reason why I have been introducing wikidata with the image maintenance tools is mainly because it was something effective (it is a property like the other ones) and not so risky if you make a mistake (an improper image is not like a partially wrong data, it is much easier to spot). Still, many of the newbies I found despite being on a wikidata-centric platform (itwikipedia makes massive use of wikidata) and showing 100s edits here simply knew nothing. We are not a platform that should assign an autopatrolled right based on simple edit count, IMHO. --Alexmar983 (talk) 04:31, 19 February 2017 (UTC)
To know your numbers you are going to need to track Special:Statistics, and I don't know if you can (back)track when rights are allocated, something might show through the API.

To amend the autopatrol cut-over it take a consensus discussion here. I see that the previous change request for rights change is is phab:T58203. Presumably the defaults can be changed though it is not evident that any wikis for editing use anything but the defaults of time/no. of edits. I see that Commons restricts uploads to different parameters for autopatrols. Rather than automatic, you might prefer that administrators are able to assign the right, it is how we manage it at enWS. At enWS as we have raised the bar to edits, we patrol with a bot utilising pywikibot's patrol.py; though having a traditional setup of namespaces, and use of Special:PrefixIndex gives us a good degree of control.  — billinghurst sDrewth 06:48, 19 February 2017 (UTC)

There are two distinct issues:
(1) Does our present system set people on autoconfirmed, who don't know Wikidata well enough for their edits not getting the patrol flag.
(2) Could we personally welcome users when we give them the autoconfirmed status in a way that's makes it more likely for the user to become are more active user of Wikidata.
I personally don't have a firm opinion on (1) but (2) seems promising to me. A personal greeting that informed by the edits the user made and that gives helpful suggestions could potentially increase our user engagement positively. Especially given that we have 2% of the users doing 98% of the edits, getting more engagement is very valuable. ChristianKl (talk) 21:31, 19 February 2017 (UTC)
I made some tests with non it-N users not with images but with labels. I told them "look, you know language X. We don't have a lot people who knows X, when you add a link here what if you open the item and add the label X yourself?" Of course it is like the images... we really don't need labels and aliases as we need properties, but it is something easy, and they get the idea. So yes you can welcome users with only "interlink edits" and propose simple tasks. And see how they react to the proposal and than later give the autopatrolled. But in any case I strongly advice to put a much higher automatic threshold for the autopatrolled flag. I am sorry for the stress of patrollers but those people if they only edit connecting articles from local platform are not aware of what wikidata is. But the good news is... they can learn fast.--Alexmar983 (talk) 03:02, 20 February 2017 (UTC)
It sounds great that you do this. When it comes to changing the way the actual autopatrol flag works we likely need a request for comments to do it. It might be worth to have a Wikiproject for sharing best practices for greeting newcomers. How about starting a Wikiproject Welcome? @Lea_Lacroix_(WMDE): as Project Manager Community Communication for Wikidata. This topic might also be worth getting investigated by the WMDE UX team. ChristianKl (talk) 09:22, 20 February 2017 (UTC)
Thanks for the idea, it's something I already thought about. I can definitely provide some help and support, also from the rest of the team, but it's better if the project is started by volunteers :) Lea Lacroix (WMDE) (talk) 09:26, 20 February 2017 (UTC)
I do think translated labels are valuable. In small languages having translated labels means that the Article Placeholder tool can serve pages. ChristianKl (talk) 09:33, 20 February 2017 (UTC)
 Comment running a bot to add welcome messages is done on numbers of wikis, and as can be expected there are upsides and downsides to a process, one of the downsides is welcoming spammers, abusers and vandals. At enWS we do it manually though we fortunately only have to worry about one language, and it looks to be appreciated by users as we regularly get 'thanks' messages, or even personal messages. At metawiki it is done with a bot, and it is a multilingual message, no idea if the bot gets thanked. Adding welcomes takes a little time, though you can make it easy with either a gadget or use of m:TemplateScript. What sort of impression and sense of community are you wishing to achieve?  — billinghurst sDrewth 13:11, 20 February 2017 (UTC)
I don't think that a bot who posts a general message that's independent of the user gives the user a feeling of being welcomed. I personally feel annoyed when I get automated bot welcome messages from 50 different Wiki's most of whose languages I don't know. It might be very good to give different people different messages. A person who just adds interwiki links encouraging them to translate labels and tell them that it helps making the Article Placeholder work (if their language enables the feature) might be a lot better than a general message. On the other hand, if you have a user who adds data about football players it might be worthwhile to encourage them to register for the Wikiproject Football.
As far as language goes, we could have a list where new users who get a minimum of 50 edits get listed by the language of their account. ChristianKl (talk) 12:55, 21 February 2017 (UTC)
Yes, that's possible. I think if you want to target users you need a retro-patroller sensibility. You don't have to target them immediately. You make a list of users with more than X edits. If those edit are more than 99% ns0 probably their talk is empty, so you can use that fact as an easy filter. You can send a welcome message that sounds like "you worked a lot here. Would you like to know more?". Since we have many users you don't have to target them all together. You can start for example with those who are autopatrolled on another wiki, and send them a message even in their own language. For example there are 5000 autopatrolled users on zhwiki, how many of them are active on wikidata with more than 500 edits? let's say 3000. Good. how many of them have an empty talk here? 2000. Good. Now you can even select those who are recently active but sending a message to unactive users is no harm in this case. it might actually bring him/her back sometimes. So you select those 2000 talks and send a message that says "you are active here, would you like to know more? We need users who speak Chinese".
We can make a project for this types of campaigns. On itwikipedia I studied these processes for years but they never wanted a "community project"... in the end I did nothing than replicate the same style. User wikimetrics are known since years, BTW, it is not difficult to "tune" them. After you have promoted users to a more "active" level, than you can have a autopatrolled that is assigned manually, because you have created a "community" that is more robust and "real". You can wait for years or you can speed up with these tricks. It is mainly your choice.
But these are mainly practical details, my core message is that wikidata does not have a "patrolling problem" per se. These patrolling "bugs" that we see are a symptom IMHO. Blocking IPs for example is removing the symptom. The cause is at the community level. It is still unbalanced and not sufficiently interconnected. You need "catalysts" to improve the community network, and that is something to do before rethinking the patrolling. Targeted welcome message and simple tasks as example are a good thing. But we need volunteers. I (casually) became the "hub" for dozens of users here, you need a profile "like mine" for at least 10-12 language. And of course more hubs of this type (that is "proactive") for the same language too.
I was thinking to go to Vienna in May and discuss these issues around, I think it is time.--Alexmar983 (talk) 05:28, 22 February 2017 (UTC)
@Alexmar983: I created https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:WikiProject_Welcome ChristianKl (talk) 10:58, 22 February 2017 (UTC)

Instance of "type of cheese"

blue cheese (Q746471) is a subclass of (P279) cheese (Q10943).

But it is also an instance of (P31) type of cheese (Q3546121). (English article: Types of cheese, French article is about types of cheese pastes, Italian article is about cheese classification)

Should I remove this second statement? It seems redundant and type of cheese (Q3546121) does not seem like a solid item to build upon. Thanks! Syced (talk) 03:27, 21 February 2017 (UTC)

No, there's no reason to remove valid data. Wikidata's philosophy is that it's okay if different people categories an item slightly differently and seeks to present both perspectives. ChristianKl (talk) 09:16, 21 February 2017 (UTC)
ChristianKl: I see, thanks for your feedback! Syced (talk) 08:00, 22 February 2017 (UTC)
type of cheese (Q3546121) is useful in order to distinguish eg the specific Edam (Q597473) from the general Dutch cheese (Q17315183) -- both are in the subclass tree of cheese (Q10943), but only one is a type of cheese. Jheald (talk) 18:44, 21 February 2017 (UTC)
Jheald: Most items that link to type of cheese (Q3546121) are not specific varieties, but rather items like Spanish cheese (Q27038733) or industrial cheese (Q3088323). That contradicts your explanation, right? Cheers! Syced (talk) 08:00, 22 February 2017 (UTC)
Hmmm. Maybe something to raise with fr:Projet:Fromage, which I think has been the most active effort in this area. Jheald (talk) 09:14, 22 February 2017 (UTC)

Property proposal category for Sport

Currently we have a lot of sport related property proposals but no sections that's focused on sport. What do you think about adding one? ChristianKl (talk) 11:17, 22 February 2017 (UTC)

Most sports property proposals are in fact authority control property proposals, thus there is already a specific section to file them into. However I would not object to having a separate section. —MisterSynergy (talk) 12:05, 22 February 2017 (UTC)

Describing physical and geographical items with OpenStreetMap tags

As a regular contributor to the OSM project and deeply interested in Wikidata, i'm very curious to know how to better describe the more rigid English dependent and flat data model in OSM to the more language independent and hierarchal model of Wikidata. This doesn't sound like a very novel idea to create a relationship between the data models of the two largest open data projects of humanity, but i'm putting it out anyway since my searches did not find anything along these lines.

To start i'm listing a few simple examples of Wikidata items as OSM tags that would describe the same feature:

Some immediate uses in my mind of this is to autogenerate Wikipedia links for the OSM tag documentation and taginfo, make it easier to map on OSM with better feature preset names and allow querying Wikidata features using OSM tags via SPARQL. Being pretty new to Wikidata, i'm not sure if adding OSM tags as properties to Wikidata items is desirable, but it would be nice to get some feedback if this is an idea worth exploring. --Planemad (talk) 11:36, 22 February 2017 (UTC)

This sounds interesting indeed. Perhaps the simplest way to start is to add interwiki links to the OSM wiki? I'm not sure this is currently possible in Wikidata, but it would help establish some sort of connection, since the page names on the OSM wiki are structured so that they can be easily parsed. Once this is done, one could do quality checks, such as, if an OSM element has a wikidata or wikipedia key, does wikidata have an equivalent statement?-Strainu (talk) 11:59, 22 February 2017 (UTC)
Are you aware of the properties OpenStreetMap tag or key (P1282) and OpenStreetMap relation ID (P402)? --Pasleim (talk) 12:21, 22 February 2017 (UTC)
Excellent! OpenStreetMap tag or key (P1282) is exactly what I was looking for thanks. Going to have some fun with this :) --Planemad (talk) 14:14, 22 February 2017 (UTC)

published in (P1433)

Is published in (P1433) suitable for cases when image of painting was published in different magazines, newspapers and books? Didn't get it clearly. For example, can I make statements that XXX painting was published in YYY book on page 12 and in ZZZ magazine, year 1913, #1, page12? --Stolbovsky (talk) 16:44, 22 February 2017 (UTC)

How to link directly to the wikidata editor?

If I know the Q and the P I want to edit, is there any way to send a user to the edit box for that particular P in that Q?--Strainu (talk) 11:23, 22 February 2017 (UTC)

Q2#P1589. A simple anchor does the job in principle, but sometimes Javascript loads slowly and moves the content further away after the browser already jumped to the anchor. —MisterSynergy (talk) 12:07, 22 February 2017 (UTC)
That doesn't link to the editor, just the current property value, so it doesn't work if the property does not yet exist in the page.--Strainu (talk) 12:50, 22 February 2017 (UTC)
I don’t know of any other method. The editor view is invoked by Javascript and therefore not easily accessible like the editor view of Wikipedia is. —MisterSynergy (talk) 13:01, 22 February 2017 (UTC)
Thank you. This seems like a good feature, I logged phab:T158851--Strainu (talk) 15:01, 23 February 2017 (UTC)

External links

Hello. This is just to let you know that there is a new template called Template:External links that you can use to display a series of links that will tell your reader how often one given external URL is used on a few of the main Wikipedias. For instance, {{External links|http://www.lemonde.fr}} will display the following line:
Use in sister projects: [ar] • [de] • [en] • [es] • [fr] • [he] • [it] • [ja] • [ko] • [nl] • [pl] • [pt] • [ru] • [sv] • [vi] • [zh] • [commons] • [species] • [wd] • [en.wikt] • [fr.wikt].
I guess this will be useful on property proposals for external identifiers, as a way to quickly check whether the target website is already widely used on the different projects. It is already used on Wikidata:Property proposal/CEV ID, if you want to have a look. Feel free to add whatever you want, but don't overload this with any given language please. This is supposed to be short and efficient. Thierry Caro (talk) 05:16, 23 February 2017 (UTC)

Hovercards not working?

Hi all, I recently enabled hovecards beta feature. and all I see is preview error. It this feature working on wikidata or is it just me? Yarl (talk) 09:02, 23 February 2017 (UTC)

Hello Yarl
That's a known issue (also the case for properties). I'll report your feedback to the developers.
Best, Trizek (WMF) (talk) 10:08, 23 February 2017 (UTC)
@Trizek (WMF): thanks, it's confusing for me, because I saw is was working on Asaf's presentation not so long time ago. Yarl (talk) 10:20, 23 February 2017 (UTC)

Survey on newbie talk pages includes unecessary references

Can someone go after these messages and remove the ref tags? I did it here. Thx, Jane023 (talk) 10:42, 23 February 2017 (UTC)

WikiProject Holocaust?

Does anyone knows about any efforts to integrate Holocaust data? We at the European Holocaust Research Infrastructure (Q21755493) project will be adding data on camps and ghettos, and are looking for collaboration.

All I can find is en:Wikipedia:WikiProject Jewish history --Vladimir Alexiev (talk) 17:19, 23 February 2017 (UTC)

@Vladimir Alexiev: No, but please feel free to start something at Wikidata:WikiProject Holocaust. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 17:40, 23 February 2017 (UTC)
@Vladimir Alexiev: I can recommend you Wikidata + GLAM facebook group. Yarl (talk) 18:11, 23 February 2017 (UTC)
@Vladimir Alexiev:, have you canvassed the staff of EHRI institutions to locate Wikipedians past, present and potential? They'd be likely recruits for a d:WikiProject Holocaust. Within the Wiki community, the Hebrew Wikipedia held a Holocaust Article Collaboration and Improvement Drive in late summer 2006, though there's no visible list of participants. I pinged you in the Facebook Wikidata + GLAM group just now, and I'm "here" every day. -- Deborahjay (talk) 11:05, 5 March 2017 (UTC)
I have added information based on information on the English Wikipedia. There are issues; how do you register that someone was incarcerated and survived and how do you register that someone died. One other aspect is terminology; we should not have different terminology depending on the historic context. So yes, linking people to the Holocaust makes sense and it needs to be considered in a wider perspective. Thanks, GerardM (talk) 12:40, 5 March 2017 (UTC)
@GerardM: to your first query: qualifiers for the property "place of detention" would use "start date" and "end date" along with "end cause" {e.g. disease, shooting, unknown, etc.) Terminology would quite often have equivalents in several languages of the period. The possibility of consultation among a multilingual team of knowledgeable editors is a good justification for setting up and working through a Project here. -- Deborahjay (talk) 14:09, 5 March 2017 (UTC)

need input on list of endpoints for SPARQL federation

Hi everyone,

Currently Wikidata Query Service does not support federated queries. Stas has been working on making it possible to enable federated queries for a limited number of SPARQL endpoints. We have now opened a page to get suggestions and agreement on the first endpoints to support. Please add your comments and suggestions: Wikidata:SPARQL federation input

Cheers --Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) (talk) 17:50, 23 February 2017 (UTC)

Daylight Savings Time

Hi, when I input statements about the time zone for a particular location, do I format it like I did in Q27568077? I made two statements for the time zone property, one for regular time and one for summertime offset. Is that okay? Icebob99 (talk) 14:39, 23 February 2017 (UTC)

I think you should use the time zone item which already includes the summertime, I guess something like Central European Time (Q25989) in your case. Currently there is not much more information, but the wikipedia links are better and later on we can structure the information better (like the exact date of change of offset) without having to redo all the entries. Koxinga (talk) 21:44, 23 February 2017 (UTC)
Just to be clear—I can take out the UTC+2:00 and leave just UTC+1:00 (Central European Time), and that would imply that the time zone recognizes DST, thus eliminating the need for the additional statement? I'm going to do that, correct me if I'm wrong. Icebob99 (talk) 01:23, 24 February 2017 (UTC)

Ping everyone who participated in a discussion

When creating a property discussion we generally ping everyone who participated in the discussion. Currently that requires manually copy-pasting their name. Maybe it's possible to write a template like Template:Ping everyone that simply pings everybody who participated in the current discussion? ChristianKl (talk) 18:40, 23 February 2017 (UTC)

I don't think that is possible with the current software. Sjoerd de Bruin (talk) 19:47, 23 February 2017 (UTC)
It seems to me like https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Template:Ping_project can read the participants list out of a specific page and ping everyone. Why do you think pinging everybody who commented on another page would be harder? ChristianKl (talk) 21:21, 23 February 2017 (UTC)
Personally I don't see the need to ping every person who commented. The proposer definitely should be ping. The other way could be to build a commented <!-- {{ping||||}} add your name if to be pinged at closure --> template with the proposal, so those who want to be pinged can add their name, and when you close the proposal then you uncomment the template and let it rip. People should be trained to assist themselves.  — billinghurst sDrewth 03:13, 24 February 2017 (UTC)

Displayed name of Noongar language

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T151269
Nys language label in Wikidata

If I expand "In more languages" for Wedge-tailed Eagle (Q752465), the Noongar language label is itself labelled as "nys", rather than in full (see screenshot, above). Where and how can this be fixed? Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 13:18, 21 February 2017 (UTC)

To add a new label language, the language has to be added to MediaWiki. How this is done is explained here. --Pasleim (talk) 13:33, 21 February 2017 (UTC)
Thank you. Even after creating an account there, I get a "You cannot post new threads to this discussion page because it has been protected from new threads, or you do not currently have permission to edit" message, on the page where it is suggested I raise my request. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 14:18, 21 February 2017 (UTC)
And now my account there has been "rejected", because "the quality of your translations did not meet the requirements". I, of course, made no translations, nor indeed any other edits. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 15:47, 23 February 2017 (UTC)

Can anyone help get this fixed, please? And can anyone tell me why doing so is apparently dependent on an external project which is not open to such requests? Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 15:48, 23 February 2017 (UTC)

I think you were misdirected. Language names are copied from a separate project called CLDR. I have added the language to the list at phab:T151269 but that's where my abilities end. Matěj Suchánek (talk) 19:38, 23 February 2017 (UTC)
In [6] User:Thiemo Mättig (WMDE) stated that adding a language to MediaWiki and TranslateWiki is preferred over adding just the language name to wmgExtraLanguageNames. I strongly support this statement. There is no point in adding labels in a language if the language is not selectable as user interface language. --Pasleim (talk) 10:20, 24 February 2017 (UTC)
There are two different things: language support and having its name localized. Are you sure you are talking about the latter? I am not sure whether that correspnds with Thiemo said in phab:T151269#2821445. By the way, I can now see the language localized in English (Noongar) but not eg. in Czech (still "nys"). Matěj Suchánek (talk) 14:34, 24 February 2017 (UTC)

Petscan: Wikidata + Sitelink - Template

Is there a way to produce a canned search on Petscan combining:

  • Wikidata item with P1367 (preferably only one P1367, but that's a detail)
  • Sitelink to en-wiki
  • No template Art UK bio on the en-wiki article

I've asked on the talk page for Petscan on meta, but then I thought here might get more visibility.

Thanks, Jheald (talk) 15:29, 22 February 2017 (UTC)

Based on your post in Meta, take a look at "Combination" at "Other sources" tab. If you use Uses items/props at "Wikidata" tab, then you should put "wikidata NOT categories" in Combination field, if you're using sparql - "sparql NOT categories". Of course, Art UK bio goes to "Has any of these templates:" at Templates&links. --Edgars2007 (talk) 16:26, 22 February 2017 (UTC)
Thanks @Edgars2007:. I couldn't get the Wikidata tab to give me anything -- it seemed to only work as a filter. But maybe I didn't know how to re-set PetScan to clear previous conditions. On the Sparql tab I can exclude categories, but can I exclude templates? (I suppose I could get the template to set a category, but I don't want people on en-wiki to complain about "more clutter".) I can indeed get the Art UK bio list from "Has any of these templates:" at Templates&links -- but I couldn't see how to exclude it. One resort would be to go via PagePile of course (or just do the excluding with a script on my own PC) -- but I was attracted by the idea of a Petscan URL that could just be put on a page, that anyone could click through on to get a live list, with no more required of them than that. Jheald (talk) 17:12, 22 February 2017 (UTC)

@Jheald: Petscan has to have a baseline list of articles on the scanned project to perform the filters/generators onto. So the scanned project is English Wikipedia, you have to configure a generator on it ('Has none of these templates' is not a generator, it is a carveout supposed to trim down a previously generated list). I'd go with Category:Painters with a depth of 3 (or 4 for good measure, but the greater the depth the slower the generation). Then I'd add 'Art UK bio' under 'Has none of these templates' in Templates and links tab and add P1367 in 'Uses items/props' in Wikidata tab. The 'Sitelink to en-wiki' part of the query is satisfied by having English Wikipedia as scanned project. Please try it out and let us know if it works for you. --Gikü (talk) 14:21, 24 February 2017 (UTC)

Nice! That works, because its easy enough to compare the count for Sitelink + P1367 with Category + P1367 to make sure that all the P1367s have an appropriate category. I just need to do that once, then anyone can use that Petscan link (#769799) to find some untemplated artists. And with 5363 to go, that's quite enough to keep everybody busy. So, it's just exactly perfect. Thank you! Jheald (talk) 16:45, 24 February 2017 (UTC)

Data type query: Tracking links to archived datasets

There are a number of projects to archive datasets of public interest. Is there a related datatype on WD? Something for URL archiving, perhaps?

An archived dataset has some basic shared data:

  • Dataset title
  • Dataset description
  • URL for canonical source (possibly multiple, if there are a set of canonical mirrors)
  • Archives (multiple)
    • Archive URL
    • Archive name?
    • Date of last archive capture

Examples here's a list of datasets archived or flagged for rescue at datarefuge hackathons (fields: uuid createdAt significance recommended_approach file_types estimated_size url title harvest_method harvest_url bag_url ckan_url) and here's another variant of the schema for the EDGI government-data initiative in the US:

"Individual source or seed URL": "http://www.eia.gov/renewable/data.cfm",
"UUID" : "E30FA3CA-C5CB-41D5-8608-0650D1B6F105",
"id_agency" : 2,
"id_subagency": ,
"id_org":,
"id_suborg":,
"Institution facilitating the data capture creation and packaging": "Penn Data Refuge",
"Date of capture": "2017-01-17",
"Federal agency data acquired from": "Department of Energy/U.S. Energy Information Administration",
"Name of resource": "Renewable and Alternative Fuels",
"File formats contained in package": ".pdf, .zip",
"Type(s) of content in package": "datasets, codebooks",
"Free text description of capture process": "Metadata was generated by viewing page and using spreadsheet descriptions where necessary, data was bulk downloaded from the page using wget -r on the seed URL and then bagged.",
"Name of package creator": "Mallick Hossain and Ben Goldman"


  • @Sj: We currently have 51 items marked as instance of (P31) data set (Q1172284) -- feel free to create "archived dataset" as a new subclass item of it if you like, for the new items to "instance of".
Here's a query for the properties currently used on them, that you could compare with the schema above: tinyurl.com/hd2qyza tinyurl.com/hosgygh
There also may be additional properties that could be useful, eg full work available at URL (P953), content deliverer (P3274), archive URL (P1065), archive date (P2960), catalog code (P528), file format (P2701).
There's also external data available at URL (P1325), which can be used to link a subject to a collection of datasets. (Examples: tinyurl.com/zzgd2xk).
Probably a good idea to start a WikiProject page, and create a schema -- such as those at eg Wikidata:WikiProject_Video_games/Properties, Wikidata:WikiProject_Books/en, Wikidata:WikiProject_Periodicals, Wikidata:WikiProject_Websites, or any of the pages listed in Category:Properties_list_in_a_WikiProject.
There may be some properties missing, that could be created -- eg original URL, container file format, ... -- better to see what people think about creating a new property, than using one which is not quite right. Jheald (talk) 01:55, 23 February 2017 (UTC)
Thanks @Jheald:. data set (Q1172284) looks like the right base type, I'll look into creating a WikiProject. It also seems that the raw data they're handling includes thousands of entries that might want to be clustered by significance / project-title before being put into wikidata, so they might use a CKAN repository for that. Do you know of examples of wikidata collections being synced with CKAN? Sj (talk) 07:40, 24 February 2017 (UTC)

Property for *describing* a location?

In the official list of natural monuments and protected areas of Moldova, the exact location (beside the district) is described by text and only on several occasions do we know the coordinates. Take for example "Râpa Tartaul" / Tartaul valley. We do not know its coordinates, because the official source did not provide any. However, we know that the site is located in Cahul District (Q2128882), specifically "la 2 km nord de satul Tartaul de Salcie, pe versantul stâng al râului Salcia" / "2 km north of Tartaul de Salcie village, on the left side of riverbed of Salcia river". Is there any property to assign this text to? Like 'location description' or something?

Please note that 1) we have these descriptions in Romanian, Russian and Ukrainian; 2) pasting the text in the description field would not work, because the description allows up to 250 characters. --Gikü (talk) 11:50, 23 February 2017 (UTC)

We have directions (P2795) for such cases. --Pasleim (talk) 13:30, 23 February 2017 (UTC)
@Pasleim: That's exactly what I was searching for! So obliged! --Gikü (talk) 14:51, 23 February 2017 (UTC)
I'm confused. How is this is any way structured data? Are these literally text descriptions in particular languages? --Yair rand (talk) 19:55, 23 February 2017 (UTC)
@Yair rand: That's a good point, but see Wikidata:Property proposal/Archive/49#P2795. --Gikü (talk) 13:58, 24 February 2017 (UTC)

Quora blog post

Quora have just published a blog post about their collaboration with Wikidata, and the work I've been doing with them to make that happen. They are now displaying links to Wikidata items in their topic management pages - about 88K of them, so far. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 19:09, 23 February 2017 (UTC)

Congratulations for getting Quora to link back to us. I'm now seeing the links to Quora in a better light. ChristianKl (talk) 19:23, 23 February 2017 (UTC)
Alright. Sounds good man. btw, glad to know the people on fb are onboard with it as well. MechQuester (talk) 19:56, 23 February 2017 (UTC)
@Pigsonthewing: a lovely succinct blog post that beautifully encapsulates use and benefits. Well done Andy, you are permitted to have a 30-second celebratory strut around your living room.  — billinghurst sDrewth 03:22, 24 February 2017 (UTC)
Thank you. Duly strutted ;-) Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 11:59, 24 February 2017 (UTC)
This probably means tht's it's now a good time to create the Spanish Quora ID as well. ChristianKl (talk) 07:30, 24 February 2017 (UTC)
Previous proposal was Wikidata:Property proposal/Quora topic ID (Spanish). Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 11:59, 24 February 2017 (UTC)

Vandalism in passive–aggressive behavior (Q1153809)

I just reverted some vandalism in this item (irrelevant offensive language in the description, and foreign-language aliases - though the latter may have been in good faith). I went to do what I would do in Wikipedia and warn the user, (though it was an IP, so this is of limited value) and tried to find a warning template. I hadn't realised that Wikidata doesn't appear to have Template space in the way other projects do. What is the recommended procedure when reverting vandalism? This is the first vandalism I have seen on Wikidata, but I haven't been round here much recently: is it a significant problem? --0ColinFine (talk) 23:38, 23 February 2017 (UTC)

For warning templates you can find them here --ValterVB (talk) 07:19, 24 February 2017 (UTC)

Wikidata description editing in the Wikipedia Android app

Wikidata description editing is a new experiment being rolled out on the Wikipedia app for Android. While this primarily impacts Wikidata, the changes will show up on the mobile versions of Wikipedia in the form of descriptions under the title of the page and in the search results. This new feature has been in the Beta version of the app for two weeks (announcement for Beta version), and has produced encouraging results: For Russian and Hebrew Wikipedias, despite being exposed to a small number of users, there have been dozens of new descriptions added, and a very low rate of vandalism or low-quality contributions. For the Catalan Wikipedia, the data is not yet conclusive due to the relatively low rate of contributions. We are now preparing to roll out this functionality to the main (stable) version of the Wikipedia app. This will still be limited to the Hebrew, Russian, and Catalan Wikipedias, since we’d like to continue to test how users interact with this feature within the same initial group of communities. As always, if have any concerns, please reach out to us at reading@wikimedia.org. Thanks! -Jkatz (WMF) 18:51, 24 February 2017 (UTC)

Making Flow the default for new accounts

Given that this country prefers to use flow, as the recent poll suggests how about enabling flow as the default way for discussion on new user pages? ChristianKl (talk) 13:36, 15 February 2017 (UTC)

Semi-OT: can you please link to “the recent poll” results? I’m curious about it … Thanks, MisterSynergy (talk) 13:49, 15 February 2017 (UTC)
meta:Collaboration/Flow_satisfaction_survey/Report#Overall_satisfaction_based_on_project_where_Flow_is_mainly_used --Pasleim (talk) 13:55, 15 February 2017 (UTC)
 Support Flow pages are much more clear. Btw, how can I change my user talk page to Flow?--Micru (talk) 15:40, 15 February 2017 (UTC)
You can just enable it in your Beta settings. (Different from other features there, enabling and disabling results in some actual edits being performed by some bot or service, so one should try to avoid toggling it on and off every second day.) --YMS (talk) 15:50, 15 February 2017 (UTC)

 Strong oppose Please, no. Please leave this weak forum impersonation in the dustbin, where it belongs. Make this crap at maximum opt-in for those, who explicitly want it, not default for defenceless newbies. Sänger (talk) 16:56, 15 February 2017 (UTC) As long as there is no way to write on a proper, flexible talkpage besides a dumb Flow one, there should be none of these dumbed down pet project junk software extensions installed. Sänger (talk) 22:30, 16 February 2017 (UTC)

I also oppose the move.--Ymblanter (talk) 20:42, 15 February 2017 (UTC)
Yikes. That was unnecessarily harsh. ( Oppose.) --Yair rand (talk) 02:18, 16 February 2017 (UTC)
 Oppose This extension with an uncertain future and that has significant flaws should not even be enabled on this wiki, in my opinion. --Rschen7754 02:32, 16 February 2017 (UTC)
 Stöder absolut inte Every present talk_page with Flow installed should instead have a mandatory Flow free alternative! -- Innocent bystander (talk) 09:32, 16 February 2017 (UTC)
 Oppose Current opt-in state is appropriate.--Jklamo (talk) 09:37, 16 February 2017 (UTC)
 Oppose One problem with Flow is that it makes it harder than with a conventional talk page to follow the full sequence of interactions that the user has had. This may be a particularly bad negative for new users who may be just finding their feet here -- if one is thinking how to write or reply to them to help them up some next step of the learning curve here, one wants to be able to see as easily as possible the sequence of what advice they may have already have been given. As well as that, coming new to Wikidata is already quite a big step into the unfamiliar for experienced Wikipedians; adding on top of that what may well be an entirely new and unfamiliar talk system to them as well feels like putting an additional unnecessary obstacle in their way. Jheald (talk) 09:39, 16 February 2017 (UTC)
But at the same time Flow is more similar to other discussion forums on the internet, so it takes less time to pick up. Deryck Chan (talk) 18:08, 23 February 2017 (UTC)
  • The mechanism for the proposed change has not been mentioned, which makes it a little ahrder to assess. As users are able to turn it on if they wish, I don't see the need to force it. Also, how would users go through the reverse process? I don't see the case made for the change.  — billinghurst sDrewth 09:48, 16 February 2017 (UTC)
 Support We use Flow on the French-speaking project chat and there is no problem. I think instead that it is easier for new users. They should not have to learn wikicode. Tubezlob (🙋) 13:16, 16 February 2017 (UTC)
@Tubezlob:It's interesting how the French project chat is much more active than the German project chat even through German has more translated labels. Do you know whether this also was the case before you switched to flow? ChristianKl (talk) 13:13, 21 February 2017 (UTC)
ChristianKl - maybe they had to be more active in the chat, because the software was so complicated? Or they like to talk more? In the meantime, some German-speakers just went on working, e.g. translating labels. 78.50.144.145 19:14, 21 February 2017 (UTC)
@ChristianKl: I think that the answers are quicker than before with Flow, and that the project chat is a little bit more active. But maybe it is cultural too: the French have the worse level in English in Europe (24/24, Germany is 11/24, see that map).
By the way, this stat shows that they are more labels in French (8.1439870 Mil) that in German (6.8655780 Mil). Tubezlob (🙋) 10:29, 25 February 2017 (UTC)
 Strong oppose it's a beta feature with a unknown prospect. --Succu (talk) 22:41, 16 February 2017 (UTC)
 Strong oppose.--Arbnos (talk) 23:42, 16 February 2017 (UTC)

Property for annual rainfall

Hi, is there a property for the annual and average rainfall of a location? The closest I could find was precipitation height (P3036), but the description reads like it's meant for storms or weather events rather than locations. Icebob99 (talk) 14:32, 17 February 2017 (UTC)

I don't think we have a property for that. It would need to be proposed. ChristianKl (talk) 07:28, 18 February 2017 (UTC)
Please see Wikidata:Property proposal/average yearly temperature. --abián 14:19, 25 February 2017 (UTC)

IDs made up by Wikipedia

I am planning to import to Wikidata the list of natural heritage items of Moldova (see list in Romanian). Unfortunately, the source of the list (Parliament of Moldova) did not provide a unique ID for each item, so we had to make them up on Wikipedia. Now for example the Orhei National Park (Q15838244) was assigned ID "MD-OR-pn-001", where MD stands for country code, OR for district code, pn for type of natural heritage item (parc național in this case). You get the idea.

The question is: what property do I use on Wikidata to import these IDs? --Gikü (talk) 18:02, 21 February 2017 (UTC)

@Gikü: What I strongly suggest is simply replace your IDs with Wikidata entry IDs. Take a look at list of monuments in Nigeria for reference. Yarl (talk) 18:20, 21 February 2017 (UTC)
@Yarl: Thank you. This is painfully unreadable though. I believe readability is important for unique IDs used in contests like Wiki Loves Earth. --Gikü (talk) 18:23, 21 February 2017 (UTC)
It seems reasonable enough to create a new property for them. Jheald (talk) 18:36, 21 February 2017 (UTC)
How about using catalog code (P528) along with the qualifier catalog (P972) "Wiki Loves Earth - Moldova"? ChristianKl (talk) 18:49, 21 February 2017 (UTC)

Please merge special item

Somebody may please merge item Battle at the Harzhorn (Q555463) with item Harzhorn (Q27243271) which both are the roman - germanic battle. Merge help section is nothing for wikidata new users. Thanks in advance!  – The preceding unsigned comment was added by Pliojason1 (talk • contribs) at 12:56, 24 February 2017‎ (UTC).

 Not done

@Pliojason1: One is for the event, the other the location where it took place; these are distinct concepts. The difference is apparent from the English labels. Perhaps labels in another language are confusing, and need to be improved? Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 14:30, 24 February 2017 (UTC)
Yes, apparently it's all about the labels, maybe I can edit those. The wikipedia articles (en) Battle at the Harzhorn and (de) Harzhornereignis have very much the same topic, differing in length only. - I finished relabeling right now. It should be clear now that both items describe the same article just with different spelling. Thanks again in advance for anybody merging these items!  – The preceding unsigned comment was added by Pliojason1 (talk • contribs) at 15:11, 24 February 2017‎ (UTC).
No. I've undone your edits. These items are not about the same concept. They will not be merged. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 19:47, 24 February 2017 (UTC)
What the Wiki articles are about is irrelevant to whether we merge Wikidata items. ChristianKl (talk) 07:14, 25 February 2017 (UTC)

P373

I tried to update Commons category (P373) in INFINITE (Q50598) but the system does not allow me. -- Innocent bystander (talk) 18:23, 24 February 2017 (UTC)

Update how? What value? What does it say? Matěj Suchánek (talk) 19:23, 24 February 2017 (UTC)
The present link is to a Category-redirect. I tried to update it. The message was written in Swedish, but I still do not understand what it says. I do not have the time now, to do the same in English, but feel free to try! -- Innocent bystander (talk) 20:50, 24 February 2017 (UTC)
✓ Done Matěj Suchánek (talk) 21:28, 24 February 2017 (UTC)
And you got no Error-messages? -- Innocent bystander (talk) 14:43, 25 February 2017 (UTC)
Nope. Matěj Suchánek (talk) 15:04, 25 February 2017 (UTC)

Properties ready for creation

Category:Properties ready for creation has over 40 entries awaiting attention. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 21:49, 24 February 2017 (UTC)

As far as the "Blocker of (Biochemistry)" properties go, I'm not sure. I think this way of naming this parantheses is new and I don't know whether it's superior to "biochemical blocker of". ChristianKl (talk) 22:13, 24 February 2017 (UTC)

Consistency

Hoi, we have a policy where the label of an item is irrelevant to its historic use. Consequently we have a situation where we are not able to provide the right label for a specific use. In the past we have combined all kinds of rulers that fit the same mould. I am going to do the same for "governors of Jamaica". As it is they represent the monarch who happens to be British. It makes even sense to include all the rulers of Jamaica.. some of those were Spanish. Thanks, GerardM (talk) 07:46, 25 February 2017 (UTC)

Hovercards broken?

I'm using the beta feature Hovercards, but it does not display any information here on Wikidata when hovering over items. Is it broken? //Mippzon (talk) 09:06, 25 February 2017 (UTC)

I'm not using it, but get errors from MediaWiki:Gadget-PopupsFix.js in my browser's console since yesterday (though the gadget itself has not been changed recently). Guess that could be related, though I don't have time to investigate any further. --YMS (talk) 11:55, 25 February 2017 (UTC)
See also above. Matěj Suchánek (talk) 15:04, 25 February 2017 (UTC)

IP users

I formally request that entry-creation privileges be restricted to logged-in users, so as to slow down spam. DS (talk) 00:15, 25 February 2017 (UTC)

Do you mean item creation, or statement adding? Or both? -- Ajraddatz (talk) 00:46, 25 February 2017 (UTC)
What's the rate of the spam? Icebob99 (talk) 16:28, 25 February 2017 (UTC)
yeah, i would like to see a metric, and better yet a time series of spam, in order to make an intelligent decision. Slowking4 (talk) 01:55, 26 February 2017 (UTC)
There looks to be 300 item creations from the 22 Feb to now. [7]. So call that 50-75 a day. I note that there is one specific user 112.198.70.1 creating many for Cebu so is the concern that specific or is it others? If it is not that user, then we would be preventing those creations, if it is that user, then there are means to manage them. It seems that the problem needs a full explanation of what is trying to be prevented or achieved. An abuse fitler could manage it from whenever turned created and turned on, though if there are beneficial creations, how would you see us proceed?  — billinghurst sDrewth 03:45, 26 February 2017 (UTC)
thank you. that seems like an admin doing an ip block would be appropriate. this is a perennial issue, see also Wikidata:Project_chat/Archive/2017/02#Vandalism_out_of_control. Slowking4 (talk) 04:16, 26 February 2017 (UTC)

Items with conflicting P31 statements

Hi, I found two separate items for mountain range, mountain range (Q46831) and non-geologically related mountain range (Q1437459). The first is for geologically related mountain ranges, the second is for non-geologically related mountain ranges. Here's a link to a query that lists all items with an instance of [Q1437459]. The first item in the query, [Q1262], has two instance of (P31) statements: one for each mountain range item. Does this imply that the Graian Alps are both geologically and non-geologically related? Is one statement flawed? Here's the query for all items which have P31 statements with both types of mountain ranges.  – The preceding unsigned comment was added by Icebob99 (talk • contribs) at 16:27, 25 February 2017‎ (UTC).

As mountain range (Q46831) is a subclass of non-geologically related mountain range (Q1437459), this is not really wrong, but in all the cases where both are defined, non-geologically related mountain range (Q1437459) is useless. If you read the Engish description, the idea of non-geologically related mountain range (Q1437459) is that the mountains are not necessarily geologically related, but they can still be. This is the more general case. However, I don't think the use of these two items is very consistent, especially as they have the same English label. If you are interested in this topic and would like to contribute, I started a few days ago a WikiProject_Mountains where we can define more precise rules on how to represent mountain related items.Koxinga (talk) 22:17, 25 February 2017 (UTC)

Wikidata items for Wikisource templates?

Hi, I'm not entirely sure what Wikidata does with pages like Wikisource templates. I found an item, Q28820558, that seemed to be a case of vandalism, but it has a sitelink to the French Wikisource. It also looks like it was created manually, so I'm not sure if it even should be on Wikidata. Can someone clarify? Should I request deletion of the item or should I take out the vandalism portion? Thanks, Icebob99 (talk) 14:50, 26 February 2017 (UTC)

I have fixed label and descriptions. Thanks --ValterVB (talk) 17:57, 26 February 2017 (UTC)

Query for area in square kilometers?

Hi, I recently built this query to find areas by country. Are these areas in square kilometers? I performed a few spotchecks to find areas that were not in square kilometers (including the United States item), but I couldn't find any items with area in square miles. Does the area property (P2046) automatically format its values in square kilometers, or if the unit is manually specified, is there a way to build a query that looks for all the values in square kilometers? Thanks, Icebob99 (talk) 16:42, 26 February 2017 (UTC)

@Icebob99: take a look at these queries:
Remember you can also request a query. Yarl ✉️️  18:01, 26 February 2017 (UTC)

Henry Elsynge confusion

How should we proceed when most of the authority control records seem to be wrong? In the case of the British parliamentary historian Henry Elsynge (Q18730405) (father) and Henry Elsynge (Q15072637) (son), authorities seem to be following the 1889 Dictionary of National Biography in giving the son's dates as 1598-1654 and attributing a series of works on Parliament to him. The current online DNB gives dates of 1606-1656 for the son and explicitly says "The various parts of the treatise entitled The Manner of Holding Parliaments in England, or, Modus tenendi parliamentum apud Anglos, sometimes attributed to Elsynge, were in fact the work of his father and namesake." Even the 1768 edition of this work in Commons points out that attribution to the son is incorrect and it should be the father, and I have some recent scholarly papers that say the same.

I am happy to deprecate the old dates and the authorship with the more recent info, but do we need to do anything about the authority controls which seem to be associated with the wrong person?

For now I've written an article for EN:WP on the father and tagged the article on the son as disputed - if there's no disagreement I'll make the changes there, but I'd prefer to get WD sorted first. - PKM (talk)

@Andrew Gray, Charles Matthews, Jheald: FYI. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 13:22, 21 February 2017 (UTC)
Thank you for raising this. Where the (old) DNB disagrees with the (new) ODNB on dates for a person, I think it is normally fine simply to override the DNB dates with the ODNB dates. For Wikipedia purposes that should do: the new article is more authoritative than the old one. There are probably "ignore all rules" exceptions, but I'm not aware of too many for dates. Identification of placenames is another matter: there I think the ODNB can introduce mistakes in disambiguation.
On authority control, it is certainly true that sources to be found on VIAF have not updated from (say) DNB dates to ODNB dates. For the purposes of telling authors apart it may not matter so much, so I suppose it is a low priority for librarians to go back and change things. Charles Matthews (talk) 15:11, 21 February 2017 (UTC)
Tricky. With a record like BNF 12371523p, do we match on the basis of the dates, or on the basis of the works?
It depends how they think of their record, which is hard for us to know.
I think I would match on the basis of the dates, and email the data teams at BNF etc. Then the question is whether they will change the dates, ie essentially keep the works and change the person; or create a new record, and transfer the works.
They may well do the former, but I think we should do the latter -- ie treat their record as a record for a person, rather than the creator of some works.
Over here, we should probably also include a statement for Elsynge the Younger as author of The Manner of Holding Parliaments, but mark it deprecated, with qualifer "reason for deprecation" = "misidentification". Jheald (talk) 15:20, 21 February 2017 (UTC)
In cases of serious confusion it is probably best to remove identifiers here for the present. I have done something here. Charles Matthews (talk) 15:30, 21 February 2017 (UTC)
I tend to be a believer in leaving bad data in the system, but marked as such, rather than removing it totally; because if it is not there, sooner or later a human or a bot will only try and add it back again...
So if it were me, I think I would have left the BNF identifier in there, but with some value for "sourcing circumstances" to indicate that it may be based on a misidentification or a misconception.
But since Charles has taken this in hand, I'll leave it with whatever he's thought best. Jheald (talk) 16:43, 21 February 2017 (UTC)
Thank you all. I'll make the remaining WP changes shortly. - PKM (talk) 19:38, 21 February 2017 (UTC)
we might want a "ODNB correcting DNB error" qualifer. we should be pushing our error correction back to viaf, they will take note. Slowking4 (talk) 01:46, 27 February 2017 (UTC)

Harmonising the categorisation of retail stores/shops

I'm interested in whether the categorisation of retail stores/shops can be made more consistent. There are these lists:

What I find a bit odd for English Wikipedia is there is no page for Shop. There is a redirect from "Retail shop" to Retail#Retail types by marketing strategy. Also the Wikidata Shop is defined as a subclass of point of sale (Q2516083) which is A) different to point of sale (Q386147) and B) I think invalid because a PoS is not the same as a shop.

Can anyone give their thoughts on:

  • Would it be logical to harmonise the lists above?
  • Should there should be any "en" link from shop (Q213441)?
  • Should Shop be a subclass of Commercial building, rather than point of sale?

Pauljmackay (talk) 18:50, 25 February 2017 (UTC)

It's entirely up to enwiki to decide if they create an article about shop (Q213441) or not. If there is one, you can add it.
--- Jura 18:09, 26 February 2017 (UTC)
Thoughts:
Cheers! Syced (talk) 11:38, 27 February 2017 (UTC)
I think I fixed the mess. point of sale (Q2516083) is not used by any item except talk pages, I have asked for its deletion. Syced (talk) 12:28, 27 February 2017 (UTC)

location (P276) vs. located in the administrative territorial entity (P131)

Hi all, is there any consensus about using these two properties regarding buildings? Right now I see two approaches:

I'm not sure what's the purpose of the latter way, because we duplicate the information (most detailed already has information about level up subdivision) and database is harder to maintain (imagine change of administrative divisions). Yarl ✉️️  10:30, 27 February 2017 (UTC)

I agree, given that Dresden (Q1731) is an administrative division it should be stated with located in the administrative territorial entity (P131). And there's no need to link to Saxony in this case. ChristianKl (talk) 10:46, 27 February 2017 (UTC)
location (P276) is to link events to places which are not administrative subdivisions.
located in the administrative territorial entity (P131) should always be used, if one wants to say a place is in an administrative subdivision. Jheald (talk) 15:38, 27 February 2017 (UTC)
@Jheald: and to make it clear, village (Q532) and city (Q515) are, per definition, also administrative subdivisions. Yarl ✉️️  16:31, 27 February 2017 (UTC)
Yes. I don't know why that is the case. For the UK I would prefer them not to be administrative subdivisions.
I would prefer that location (P276) not located in the administrative territorial entity (P131) would be used when values would be in classes village (Q532) or city (Q515) in the UK.
located in the administrative territorial entity (P131) should also not be used for subjects which are not places, ie events.
It is possible that in some other countries village (Q532) and city (Q515) are recognised administrative subdivisions -- but this (IMO) would be better handled by recognising them as such specifically in the subclasses of administrative subdivisions for that country, and not more generally. Jheald (talk) 16:51, 27 February 2017 (UTC)
village (Q532) is currently a subclass administrative territorial entity (Q56061). I don't think that is correct. At least for the Netherlands that seems to be incorrect. Multichill (talk) 17:53, 27 February 2017 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #249

Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Development
    • Continued to finalize the initial version of Federation (needed to be able to use Wikidata items and properties to describe media on Commons in the future)
    • More work on baseline for Lexeme entity type for Wiktionary support

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here. These other tasks need a volunteer.

Adequate SPARQL Tutorials/References

I'm interested to know more about SPARQL and its wiki-based applications, thats why I would like to ask for your opinions about recommendable books/tutorials that helps to understand and apply SPARQL for diverse issues in wiki-world. I've already watched some of the wikimedia foundation presentations/vedios but still feel the need of more deep understanding. This would help me to create some tools I'm thinking about and to encourage more people in the Arabic World to contribute in wikidata and to use its awesome possibilites. I'll be thankfull for any recommendations --Sky xe (talk) 16:03, 22 February 2017 (UTC)

If you need a query for a specific purpose but don't know how to write the query, go to https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Request_a_query and write what you need. ChristianKl (talk) 16:53, 22 February 2017 (UTC)
  • @Sky xe: A bit like The Matrix there's a limit to what you can be told -- you really have to try it for yourself! There is no substitute for setting yourself challenges of interesting queries you would like to make, and keeping a user page of how you achieved them.
It sounds like you've already seen Asaf's recent video introducing Wikidata, which touches on SPARQL. The next place to go is the portal at Wikidata:SPARQL query service/Wikidata Query Help, in particular the "gentle introduction" and the "beginner-friendly course" linked on the left. Each time there is an example, see how you can change in it to do something similar on data that is particularly interesting to you -- there really is no substitute for trying it out. It would also be a huge service to translate some of these into Arabic, or create your own, once you are more SPARQL confident.
You might also like to try Wikidata:SPARQL_query_service/queries, though frankly that page could use a lot of work (I think User:D1gggg may have it in his sights, so there may be hope) -- but its talk page is not a bad place to ask if there's anything you get stuck on. There are also some very good pages of example queries, both Wikidata:SPARQL_query_service/queries/examples, as well as various users' own pages eg, User:MartinPoulter/queries, User:TweetsFactsAndQueries/Problems. (I'm sure people can add more).
As for external resources, if you're anything like me you will find yourself googling things that will often lead back to the official reference spec at https://www.w3.org/TR/sparql11-query/ , or to questions answered at StackExchange etc.
In terms of books, there's an O'Reilly book Learning SPARQL by Bob DuCharme that is certainly readable, though obviously not containing anything specific to Wikidata -- I think I found that this could be a way to get more of the things that SPARQL could do into my head; but I think I find that once I have an idea that SPARQL can do something, I tend to reach for google first for more on how to do it. (Perhaps just that my keyboard tends to be nearer than my bookshelf!)
Hope this helps -- and have fun! For myself, I find it one of the most exciting things about Wikidata -- a real rush to be able to ask questions about almost anything in the world, all in the one data store. (Though sometimes it can be a challenge that either one has to find a way to work the query to get as much as one can within the permitted 30 seconds; or that our data is frustratingly not yet complete enough -- but of course that then just lays down the challenge to how to improve our data here!)
Hope you enjoy, all best Jheald (talk) 16:56, 22 February 2017 (UTC)

Thank you a lot for your answers. I indeed watched some videos about SPARQL, including the online introduction by Asaf. It was great to have the chance to ask him and it was very helpful. And you @Jheald: have confirmed my feelings that there's no way but to learn it by trying. The notes and suggestions of all of you are appreciated, and it will help me coming forward and I will start investing more time in the wikidata & SPARQL work in the next months. I do notice the lack of data and that's also why I'm feeling the need to encourage more and more people to take part at the enrichment. I think, smart Games like those of Magnus Manske would make it more comfortable for people to do it. My part will be the creation of media (different videos) and hopefully some good tools to show Arabic speaking people how awesome wikidata is and why it is important to be active. Im optimistic about the project --Sky xe (talk) 00:45, 25 February 2017 (UTC)

  • When it comes to actively using Wikidata, it's worth noting that there are a myriad of different ways to use Wikidata. Today most of my Wikidata usage was to use it as a multilingual dictionary for anatomy terms. Partly I benefit from the existing knowledge in Wikidata and when it's missing I add new translations or straighten the labels up. I could imagine that some Arabic speaking people also could use it as a dictionary. ChristianKl (talk) 22:36, 27 February 2017 (UTC)

Wikidata visualization interface generator

I have been interested in several different topics in Wikidata (administrative entities, awards, mountains, etc.), but I found that each time it was not easy to navigate through the existing data with the Wikidata interface. What are the subclasses or instance of a given class? What is the . Some interfaces have been developed, for artworks, timelines, etc. but they all cover very specific needs. I ended up doing (or at least starting, nothing was good enough to share) three different but similar interfaces:

  • When looking at administrative entities, what I wanted to see was a hierarchical tree of administrative entities using located in the administrative territorial entity (P131) to define the hierarchy, then a map of all sub entities of any selected entity (with the shapes coming from OpenStreetMap). I lost it, but the result was something like this
  • When looking at awards, what I wanted to see was a hierarchical tree using subclass of (P279) then for a given award a table of all winners by year. It gives something like this.
  • When looking at mountains, I wanted to visualize the hierarchy of mountain ranges, which is represented by instance of (P31), then the map of all mountains inside a given mountain range. Something like this.

However, I realize now that what would really be useful is a way to simplify the creation of such specialized interfaces. A kind of form where a user just has to specify a few parameters, maybe a few SPARQL queries to generate a full interface with a navigation tree, a table (similar to what Listeria can do) and/or a map. The most basic use cases would not require programming knowledge apart from the properties and entities ID to use to obtain a workable interface, and more advanced interfaces could use this as a basis before customizing the generated result.

In my opinion, this would greatly improve navigation in the data in Wikidata, as well as push for more consistent data model as problems in the hierarchy become much more visible.

Does it exist already? If it does not exist, would you be interested in such a tool? Koxinga (talk) 10:55, 26 February 2017 (UTC)

I'm not aware of a present solution. I would imagine that the ideal solution would be to integrate a feature in SPARQL that produces nice trees of data. ChristianKl (talk) 17:55, 27 February 2017 (UTC)
Perhaps you could create some graphics as mock-ups for how you think this would look; alternatively, you could provide some web pages that do something simlar. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 21:53, 27 February 2017 (UTC)

Fixing cases where the wrong property is used

Iraq Inquiry (Q4165309) has several people listed using has part(s) (P527), whereas they should be listed using participant (P710). Is there a tool, or script, that can easily convert such cases, preserving qualifiers and references? Or could someone make one? Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 23:36, 27 February 2017 (UTC)

Blocked value oddity

I'm trying to add Quora topic ID (P3417), with the value "Advertorial", to advertorial (Q380060).

However, that cause QuicktStatements to hang, and attempting to do so manually causes the "save" option to grey out. It would let me add "Advertoria".

Is the word "Advertorial" on some sort of blacklist? Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 13:20, 22 February 2017 (UTC)

I was able to add it. Since I'm a sysop, this could indicate that some blacklist doesn't like the value. I checked SpamBlacklist and AbuseFilter, niether of them logged an action on that page. I don't know well the rest of anti-spam tools. Matěj Suchánek (talk) 17:19, 22 February 2017 (UTC)
I could reproduce Pigsonthewing observation with native label (P1705) instead of Quora topic ID (P3417). There seems to be a blacklist involved. Given that the problem is solved by you adding the value I see however no further need to investigate. ChristianKl (talk) 19:03, 23 February 2017 (UTC)
Actually, I won't be able to sleep unless I find out what's going on. I made a test on Wikidata Sandbox (Q4115189), both via the interface and API, without problem. If you dare, please submit this form (action=wbcreateclaim) and come back with the response if negative. Matěj Suchánek (talk) 19:53, 23 February 2017 (UTC)
  • The response I get is:

{ "error": { "code": "badtoken", "info": "Invalid CSRF token.", "*": "See https://www.wikidata.org/w/api.php for API usage. Subscribe to the mediawiki-api-announce mailing list at <https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-api-announce> for notice of API deprecations and breaking changes." }, "servedby": "mw1195" } But then it's not clear how to enter a correct CSRF token. ChristianKl (talk) 13:31, 28 February 2017 (UTC)

International Open Data Day

International Open Data Day is this coming Saturday, 4 March. Are we doing anything to mark it? Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 17:12, 27 February 2017 (UTC)

@Lea Lacroix (WMDE): ? Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 22:51, 27 February 2017 (UTC)
Hello,
I will attend to the event organized by OKLabs in Berlin and make a short introduction about Wikidata.
If any of you organize something, take pictures or create slides, feel free to add it in the next Weekly Summary :) Lea Lacroix (WMDE) (talk) 09:58, 28 February 2017 (UTC)

Obtaining a user's preferred languages, for a templated query

Is there any good way that a template can get the list of a user's preferred languages, to include them at the top of the list for the wikibase:label service in a WDQS query?

Someone has suggested this Mediawiki API call is available (Special:ApiSandbox#action=query&format=json&meta=userinfo&uiprop=acceptlang), but can that be accessed from within a template, ie from Lua, rather than from Javascript ?

It seems we try to be very multilingual in our data, but it is hard to access it on-wiki in a multilingual way. Jheald (talk) 13:03, 25 February 2017 (UTC)

Besides, when I run that call for myself, with "uselang=user", it only returns "en", not the other languages I have in my Babel that I can understand a little. Jheald (talk) 13:06, 25 February 2017 (UTC)
As far as I know, Scribunto has been limited, so it cannot access api today. -- Innocent bystander (talk) 14:46, 25 February 2017 (UTC)
@Innocent bystander: Okay; but which call(s) would I use to obtain this information, even if Scribunto was working? Jheald (talk) 15:38, 25 February 2017 (UTC)
An ugly workaround is {{int:lang}} or frame:preprocess( '{{int:lang}}' ). Matěj Suchánek (talk) 13:40, 27 February 2017 (UTC)
@Matěj Suchánek: Thanks, that's what I've gone with for the moment. It's actually perfect for a templated query, one can just include it directly in the templated query text.
Tracked in Phabricator
Task T157182
I am now just waiting for ticket T157182 to be cleared in order for it to actually work, but it's in the "ready for work" column of the workboard for WDQS on Phabricator, so may be sorted quite soon.
Daniel Kinzler also made an interesting point on the mailing list: it's very difficult to allow a full user-specific choice of preferred languages to be included in a template, because that could really mess up cacheing -- the number of potential different versions of the expanded wikitext could explode. So perhaps this is one case where anything better has to be done in Javascript, by a gadget modifying the page at read-time, and can't be done in a template or module. User:Molarus may have been taking some exploratory steps in this direction, per this discussion on Commons. Jheald (talk) 22:40, 28 February 2017 (UTC)

New WikiProject - Fashion

I've kicked off a new Wikidata WikiProject, Wikidata:WikiProject Fashion. This project grew out of a discussion of GLAM (and then clothing) ontologies in the Facebook Wikidata + GLAM group. It seems there is sufficient interest to kick off a project. Please join us if you are interested in clothing and fashion-related topics! - PKM (talk) 21:29, 28 February 2017 (UTC)

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