Wikidata talk:WikiProject Periodicals/Archive 3

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Adding Price One Penny data about 19th-century penny weekly literature

Notified participants of WikiProject Periodicals

I would like to contribute the data from my database Price One Penny to Wikidata. I've already created an element (Price One Penny (Q106923678)) that I've used for instance as a reference regarding the creator of Sweeney Todd (Q669485). I was wondering if you could please chime in on my 5 generic property proposals for external identifiers, especially Wikidata:Property proposal/Price One Penny Periodical ID that could provide external identifiers for 25 periodicals (most of which are not yet in Wikidata). The 4 other proposals are related to authors, publishers, works, and libraries. Thanks! Marianika (talk) 02:34, 27 May 2021 (UTC)

@Marianika: Such a small database is unlikely to get a dedicated property. Usually they need hundreds of IDs in the source. Instead you can just use described at URL (P973) and point directly to your URLs. --99of9 (talk) 07:32, 27 May 2021 (UTC)

@99of9: Thanks for the info! Wikidata:Property proposal/Price One Penny Periodical ID is actually the only property that would have less than 100 IDs: the database contains thousands of works by hundreds of authors and publishers, held by hundreds of libraries. If the Periodical ID gets voted down, I'll use described at URL (P973) for the periodicals! Marianika (talk) 15:02, 27 May 2021 (UTC)

Bulletin of the United States National Museum (take 2)

Last time I brought these up about a year ago (see here), I don't think I explained the problem very well, so maybe I should restate the problem from scratch...

There are four items named "Bulletin of the United States National Museum" on Wikidata currently, as of writing:

From what I'm aware, there were only ever two runs of the USMN bulletin, one named "Bulletin of the United States National Museum" between 1875 and 1905 (with ISSN 0096-2961), and one just named "Bulletin" between 1907 and 1971 (with ISSN 0362-9236). And yet, there are four items!

For some reason, the first of these seems to be trying to be both information on one of the two runs of the bulletin, and information on a single volume of the same bulletin. This makes the information in the item very confused and messy. Apparently the justification was that it was for Wikisource? (Note: Why would you name an item for a single volume as if it was for the entire serial? That does not even make sense)

The above is just the tip of the iceberg with the problems with these items, as I tried to highlight last year. This is not good for Wikidata at all. What's the best way of fixing this mess? Monster Iestyn (talk) 16:07, 6 June 2021 (UTC)

Dates for magazine/journal volumes

Notified participants of WikiProject Periodicals: do volumes of periodicals that are composed of multiple volumes get their own dates? For example:

Texaco Star (Q107565387) has multiple volumes, e.g.
- Texaco Star, Volume 1 (Q107565394) covers Nov 1913 to Oct 1914 in 12 issues e.g.:
  - Texaco Star, Volume 1 (Q107565394) is the Nov 1913 issue → publication date (P577) = November 1913
    - Petroleum Products (Q107566482) - does this have any date?

Also, some other questions:

For the issue (Texaco Star, Volume 1 (Q107565394)) is volume (P478) a top level property as indicated at Wikidata:WikiProject Periodicals#Issue item properties, or a qualifier on issue (P433) as at the example used there: Post- och Inrikes Tidningar (2nd Jan 1821) (Q19536380)?
Is it part of (P361) or part of the series (P179) for each of volume and issue? Wikidata:WikiProject Periodicals#Volume item properties indicates part of the series (P179) for volume, but part of (P361) for issue. Is that right? And then published in (P1433) for the articles?
What other properties should be replicated between issue, volume and periodical?

I'd really like to get this nailed down tight because I'd like to use this kind of data at Wikisource so I'd like to know what is the canonical "right" way, and then the WS templates/modules/scripts can do it that way, and deviations can be corrected.

Cheers, Inductiveload (talk) 14:13, 18 July 2021 (UTC)

Again I would like to remark that "series" also has a different meaning in several journals. See this discussion of a year ago. As far as I know that problem is not yet "solved". --Dick Bos (talk) 14:30, 18 July 2021 (UTC)

Also basically the same question was asked above (by me) and left quite a few unanswered questions

obviously "what about series?" but also,
it seems to indicate separate items are not preferred for volumes/issues, but:
1. this is add odds with Wikidata:WikiProject Periodicals#Volume item properties and Wikidata:WikiProject Periodicals#Issue item properties
2. if you don't use them, the parent item will end up with hundreds or thousands of qualified claims), and
It's still unclear to me if it's preferred to use volume/issue/page as "top-level" claims, or as qualifiers to "published in (P1433). The former appears to be what, e.g. User:Research Bot does, but the latter seems more correct to me based on my understanding of qualifiers.
It's not clear what published in (P1433) should point to (the docs indicate that this goes to the top level item, but that seems at odds with the Main item/(Series/)?Volume/Issue tree where each level is part of the series (P179) (or part of (P361)?) of the parent item, not the main item.

Not wanting to sound petulant here as I know it's a hard problem, but the current unclear state of periodical ontologies at Wikidata means Wikidata is not really useful at all for Wikisources handling of periodicals. This is a pity because WD should be the perfect home for this kind of highly-structured data. Inductiveload (talk) 14:50, 18 July 2021 (UTC)

@ Inductiveload: As someone who uploads a lot of article-level metadata to Wikidata and follows the User:Research Bot convention of a fairly "flat" structure (i.e., volume, issue, pagination being properties of the article) I think the issue here is that there are two rather different communities working on the "same" thing. As a researcher I want easy access to bibliographic metadata for an article and a "flat" structure makes sense. A "Main item/(Series/)?Volume/Issue tree" would be a nightmare to work with, both to add items (I'd have to map metadata to multiple Wikidata items, say for each volume, each issue within a volume, etc.) and for retrieval (and queries to retrieve article metadata are already pretty complicated). In this view, volumes and issues are convenience terms to help match "strings to things", rather than things themselves. Obviously this doesn't really fit with treating issues and volumes as separate items that may have a digital representation (e.g., a scanned copy in Internet Archive) which I'm assuming is the issue for Wikisource users (it's a long time since I've looked at Wikisource). Might a way forward be to encode the "Main item/(Series/)?Volume/Issue tree" using part of (P361) relations? This could exist side-by-side with published in (P1433), so that people wanting to quickly retrieve articles from a journal can query by published in (P1433) (which effectively collapses the article/issue/volume/journal path into a single jump), and people wanting to describe the part-whole relations between issues, volumes, etc. can query part of (P361). Obviously this may lead to the same data appearing in multiple places (e.g., publication dates) and hence the possibility of internal inconsistency. But it seems that insisting on a single "right" way to do it will cause grief for one or other of the sets of people who care about this topic. Rdmpage (talk) 11:39, 19 July 2021 (UTC)

@Rdmpage: Sure, I can see why the flat structure makes sense for people who only care about the article (researchers and WP citations, for example).

However, at Wikisource, as you surmise, we usually handle scans of works on the volume level (sometimes on the issue level, e.g. Sci. Am.). We also often have pages at WS that refer to "pieces" of volumes: in this case, The Texaco Star, Volume 1, Number 1 could well have its own page. Certainly, WS needs something to hang all the metadata about the volume, and ideally, the number (for example: how many pages does the volume/issue have, what is the next issue, who was the editor of this issue, etc).

I don't really mind (or even care) if the article item replicates some metadata such as the publication date. That's a trivial consistency check (actually: can the article can have different dates if it went to pre-print first?), and is kind of "not my problem". I also don't mind if "someone" wants to decide that every piece of metadata about each volume hangs off the main periodical item with a volume/issue qualifier. If Texaco Star (Q107565387) gets another 1210 qualified claims, (say 10 for each of the 120 issues in just the first 10 volumes, plus another 10 for the volumes themselves), that's fine by me, but I feel it would not be looked on as ideal. Especially as Texaco Star likely has something more closer to 1000 issues all told, so that's 10000+ claims on one item.

What I do want is "someone" to figure out how to represent it consistently and lay down the law. I don't have to like it, I'll figure something out in any case. I don't mind if there's duplication: that's easy to query for and fix if needed. I don't mind if a special "build a periodical" tools is needed: I'll write it. But schema inconsistency is a bullet to the head of being able to use WD at all, and the lack of clarity means that nothing can be done at WS for periodicals because no layout is "safe" to assume. It's been months since I asked above and I am no closer to answers about what to do.

For example, if it's decided that the "parts" are all linked up with part of (P361) and articles are published in (P1433) the root periodical, then that's fine: the volume/issue have volume (P478) and issue (P433) respectively and that can easily be used to query for all articles from that issue, or the inverse query: find the issue for a given article.

If WD feels it doesn't wish to bother with volume/issue items at all, that's 100% fine by me, and I can explore other methods, like on-Wiki Lua data and or Toolforge bots, which is less likely to bump into the fetch limits anyway. But it adds huge complexity, more tooling to break, time wasted, technical debt and learning curves and again, I don't want to get going to do that if someone is going to pull the rug out from under me and change the "One True Schema" later on down the road and make me scrap it all.

RE: Might a way forward be to encode the "Main item/(Series/)?Volume/Issue tree" using part of (P361) relations? This is indeed what I have done so far with Texaco Star. As I said above, even this is slightly unclear to me because the documentation uses both part of the series (P179) and part of (P361). Which is right? Inductiveload (talk) 13:11, 19 July 2021 (UTC)

@ Inductiveload: I feel your pain, I've always found figuring out the "rules" to be a challenge, especially as often there aren't any (or worse, the rules seem badly thought out). Given that things here seem to evolve by consensus, one strategy might be to do some SPARQL queries to count how many times particular properties are used to link the objects you care about, and if there's a bunch of cases where others have done what you'd like to do, follow that approach. The more items you add the more "support" that approach implicitly gets. I think if you wait for someone to "lay down the law" you'll be waiting a long time. Rdmpage (talk) 13:45, 19 July 2021 (UTC)

Conflation of journals and volumes, misleading copyright status values

Notified participants of WikiProject Periodicals: I've noticed multiple times now that data for a journal and single (usually public-domain) volumes from the same journal are sometimes put into the same item. Why is this done exactly? Can volumes not get their own items on wikidata, despite this WikiProject's main page indicating otherwise? On top of this (and maybe because of this), some of these also have a copyright status (P6216) statement that, while it may be true for the single volume, is wrong in the context of the journal itself.

See for instance Biologiske meddelelser (Q51447496), which began publication in 1917 and ceased in 1971. It includes data for volume 3 (published in 1917), the only one in the journal currently available on Biodiversity Heritage Library and Internet Archive. As the copyright status (P6216) statement clarifies, this volume was published more than 95 years ago and is therefore within public domain. Yet, the fact the journal ceased in 1971 contradicts this statement (and will continue to do so until 2066). I tried adding a volume (P478) qualifier to the copyright status (P6216) property's statement to clarify this, but I then learned that's not a valid qualifer at the moment. Is there any standard way of dealing with this at all?

If I sound annoyed at all, I'm sorry about that. I can't think how many times I've come across mixed-up or misleading data on Wikidata now, but the mixups I see with periodicals in particular make me feel frustrated.

Monster Iestyn (talk) 16:48, 4 September 2021 (UTC)

@Monster Iestyn: I feel your pain, but I suspect these issues are inevitable where there are bulk uploads of data where that data has limited scope. There do seem to be qualifiers of copyright status (P6216) that would help, such as start time (P580), end time (P582), and applies to part (P518). Personally I think we will always run into these issues, especially as copyright is likely not a property of a thing such as a periodical, and article, or a book, but rather a particular representation and jurisdiction. Hence I suspect that most statements on Wikidata regarding copyright are likely to be inaccurate. Rdmpage (talk) 08:18, 6 September 2021 (UTC)
@Rdmpage: Well, that's good to know, though start/end time feels a bit awkward on such statement somehow, especially when copyright cut-off years are involved; wouldn't end time have to be updated continuously? Though then again, a bot could do that (bots seem to do a lot of the work on this website in general). Monster Iestyn (talk) 12:35, 6 September 2021 (UTC)

Part of (P361) or Part of series (P179) for volumes

Notified participants of WikiProject Periodicals

There are nearly the same number of volume (Q1238720)s (which a sub-items of some kind of periodical) which use each of part of the series (P179) and part of (P361):

part of the series (P179): 279 results

part of (P361): 306 results

both: 1 result

SELECT ?item ?itemLabel ?pubdate ?parentLabel
WHERE
{
  ?item (wdt:P31/wdt:P279*) wd:Q1238720 . # item is a volume of some sort
  ?item wdt:P179 ?parent . # item part of series
  ?parent (wdt:P31/wdt:P279*) wd:Q1002697 . # parent is a periodical
  SERVICE wikibase:label { bd:serviceParam wikibase:language "[AUTO_LANGUAGE],en". }
}

Try it!

SELECT ?item ?itemLabel ?pubdate ?parentLabel
WHERE
{
  ?item (wdt:P31/wdt:P279*) wd:Q1238720 . # item is a volume of some sort
  ?item wdt:P361 ?parent . # item part of
  ?parent (wdt:P31/wdt:P279*) wd:Q1002697 . # parent is a periodical
  SERVICE wikibase:label { bd:serviceParam wikibase:language "[AUTO_LANGUAGE],en". }
}

Try it!

# Volumes of a periodical with a publication date set
SELECT ?item ?itemLabel ?pubdate ?parentLabel
WHERE
{
  ?item (wdt:P31/wdt:P279*) wd:Q1238720 . # item is a volume of some sort
  ?item wdt:P179 ?parent . # item part of series
  ?item wdt:P361 ?parent . # item part of
  ?parent (wdt:P31/wdt:P279*) wd:Q1002697 . # parent is a periodical
  SERVICE wikibase:label { bd:serviceParam wikibase:language "[AUTO_LANGUAGE],en". }
}

Try it!

Meanwhile, there are 348 issue (Q28869365)s that use part of the series (P179) and 103 that use part of (P361) (and 5 have both).

The documentation says to use:

For the periodical itself: part of (P361)
For a volume: part of the series (P179)
For an issue: part of (P361)

Is this intentionally different for volumes? This makes is more confusing to walk a chain like (wdt:P1433/wdt:361*) Inductiveload (talk) 21:01, 6 September 2021 (UTC)

@ Inductiveload: The first query doesn't work, I think you've left of "P" in the line "?item wdt:179 ?parent . # item part of series" Rdmpage (talk) 08:02, 7 September 2021 (UTC)

@Rdmpage: ummm...just checking if anyone is paying attention! ^_^ Inductiveload (talk) 08:32, 7 September 2021 (UTC)

Dates for periodicals volumes (take 2)

Notified participants of WikiProject Periodicals

Since there was nothing doing above, I think maybe that was too many questions at once. So I will for now propose simply the following is added to the volume section:

publication date (P577)

Title	ID	Data type	Description	Examples	Inverse
publication date	P577	Point in time	publication date: date or point in time when a work was first published or released	Biographical Memoirs. Vol. 1. <publication date> 1877	-

volume (Q1238720)s that already have publication dates:

# Volumes of a periodical with a publication date set
SELECT ?item ?itemLabel ?pubdate ?parentLabel
WHERE
{
  ?item (wdt:P31/wdt:P279*) wd:Q1238720 . # item is a volume of some sort
  ?item wdt:P577 ?pubdate . # item has a publication date
  ?item wdt:P179 ?parent . 
  ?parent (wdt:P31/wdt:P279*) wd:Q1002697 . # parent is a periodical
  SERVICE wikibase:label { bd:serviceParam wikibase:language "[AUTO_LANGUAGE],en". }
}

Try it!

Inductiveload (talk) 20:40, 6 September 2021 (UTC)

Support --99of9 (talk) 01:12, 8 September 2021 (UTC)

I have made the addition. Thanks for the input @99of9 :-) Inductiveload (talk) 16:52, 21 September 2021 (UTC)

Suggest to use "periodical volume" rather than "volume"

"Volume" has two related senses:

A separately-bound unit of a very large book, done for reasons of practicality in size and/or separate publication: e.g. The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, Volume 1 (Q108803819)
A unit of a periodical (i.e. a work that is by definition issued piecemeal), containing multiple issue (Q28869365)s for "some" contiguous period, e.g. a year, 6 months, or a quarter, usually, but not always, with a separate numbering. E.g. Popular Science Monthly, Volume 1 (Q105323441)

These are not always captured by the same term in ontologies (eg. in FaBiO), and certainly have very different semantics. Specifically, only one is a collection of issue (Q28869365)s.

Using instance of (P31) → volume (Q1238720), qualified with of (P642) → periodical (Q1002697) is possible (and is sometimes done), but that does not resolve the conflation between the senses.

So, I have created periodical volume (Q108804797) and I suggest that volumes of periodicals should become instance of (P31) of that, while volumes of books, encyclopedias and dictionaries, etc., remain as instances of the parent concept volume (Q1238720). Inductiveload (talk) 18:35, 5 October 2021 (UTC)

Journal of Apicultural Research and Bee World

Notified participants of WikiProject Periodicals

Journal of Apicultural Research is a distinct journal from Bee World, but this item lumps them together as one. I'm not sure what the process is for separating the two. Most (but not all) identifiers distinguish between the two. Any help or suggestions are most welcome. Friesen5000 (talk) 14:20, 16 October 2021 (UTC)

Asking trade organizations of news publishers re. Wikidata?

Notified participants of WikiProject Periodicals

What if anything have people done regarding asking profession / trade organizations of news publishers for their support in getting lists of publishers who are members into Wikidata?

I'm thinking of approaching the Kansas Press Association (Q104169386) (KPA), Missouri Press Association (Q100181432) (MPA), Local Independent Online News (LION) Publishers (Q104172660), and America's Newspapers (Q99306383) about their level of interest in the following:

Improving the coverage in Wikidata and Wikipedia of their organizations and their news publishing members?
The changing economic environment for news and what they might be willing to support to respond to these changes?^[1]

If an organization expresses interest in possibly helping improve the Wikidata coverage of their news publishing members, what specifically would we ask of them?

I also want to try to work with w:Wikipedia:WikiProject_Newspapers to try to organize w:edit-a-thons to improve Wikipedia coverage of newspapers, especially ones that are a newspaper of record (Q1416653). However, I thought it best to start with Wikidata, because that should be easier, still useful, and could help build a relationship.

Thanks, DavidMCEddy (talk) 04:43, 21 October 2021 (UTC)

References

↑ They doubtless know that since 2004 newspapers in the US have lost 70 percent of their advertising revenue. They've cut the number of journalists they employ in half. A quarter have ceased publication, and many of the ones that continue are publishing less. News Deserts and Ghost Newspapers: Will local news survive? (Q100251717)

@DavidMCEddy: I'm not aware of any such effort for Wikidata up to now, and it definitely sounds like a good idea. We do have Newspapers.com paper ID (P7259), USNPL ID (P5454), Chronicling America newspaper ID (P4898) and several similar ID's for newspapers in other countries, so to the extent those databases are useful a good starting point would be to add items with those id's that Wikidata is currently missing. Mix-n-Match is a one way to do that, and it already has a page for media id's: https://mix-n-match.toolforge.org/#/group/ig_authority_control_for_the_media ArthurPSmith (talk) 13:55, 21 October 2021 (UTC)

@ArthurPSmith: Thanks for the reply.

Might I be able to get help with the technical details if I got an organization like one of those I mentioned to agree to work with us to get part or all of their news publishing members into Wikidata?

FYI, the first and third of the entries at the Mix-n-Match link you gave represent two successive analyses of "Identifier for newspapers at the Newseum website's front page gallery":

* The best (second pass) analysis fully matched 83.6% of entries while leaving 11.8% unmatched.

* The earlier analysis fully matched 34.7% of entries while leaving 32.3% unmatched.

Both were by User:Trivialist, whose Wikidata User page says, "I know enough about regular expressions to be slightly dangerous." I've been writing code since 1963, including fairly trivial uses of regular expressions. If someone like Trivialist gave me scripts, there's a reasonable chance I could adapt them to do what would be needed. However, I wouldn't know how to start without a little help.

I want to contact the four organizations mentioned above, as I indicated, but I don't want to do it without a collaborator.

Thanks, DavidMCEddy (talk) 16:46, 21 October 2021 (UTC)

Well, I regret saying *that* on my user page :) I don't have any scripts per se; I pointed mix-n-match's scraper at Newseum's front page gallery (when they had one) and did some very basic scraping of those pages. If you have data is in comma or tab separate form, you might be able to feed it into mix-n-match's importer. Trivialist (talk) 22:27, 21 October 2021 (UTC)

@Trivialist: Thanks for your reply. May I ask more questions?

In particular, I do not find the "mix-n-match's scraper" you mentioned. However, I have scraped a few web sites and extracted tables that I wanted using w:R (programming language), so I can probably produce a csv file of news publishers, who are members of at least some of the above organizations. Then I could ask mix-n-match's importer to read that file and follow my nose from there.

What's the point of doing that? To categorize the different publishers as either "Fully matched", "Preliminarily matched", "Not applicable to Wikidata", or "Unmatched", so that can be used in organizing an edit-a-thon to do the following:

Evaluate all those "Preliminarily matched" to either confirm or correct the preliminary match?
Help people prioritize their work to create entries for "Unmatched" items before worrying about seeing if they can improve the "Fully matched" items?

Thanks, DavidMCEddy (talk) 20:57, 23 October 2021 (UTC)

Here is the mix-n-match manual, which probably explains things better than I could.

And you've pretty much gotten the point. Mix-n-match will compare the dataset to info in Wikidata, and categorize them into "preliminarily matched" or "unmatched." Then you can go through and quickly match the preliminary matches with one click each before moving on to the unmatched items. Trivialist (talk) 01:33, 24 October 2021 (UTC)

Need a property for "Newspaper of record"

Notified participants of WikiProject Periodicals

Some periodicals have instance of (P31) = newspaper of record (Q1416653).

However, shouldn't every newspaper of record (Q1416653) also have a property that indicates the jurisdiction for which the said periodical in the official "Newspaper of record"?

I found Property P1001, applies to jurisdiction (P1001). However, not one of the first 50 Pages that link to "Property:P1001" seem to be a Newspaper of record. ???

Thanks, DavidMCEddy (talk) 20:40, 23 October 2021 (UTC)

managing name change?

Notified participants of WikiProject Periodicals

How would you suggest I manage / document changes in the structure and name of The Beacon (Kansas City)?

They were founded in 2020 and have since created an affiliate in Wichata and split their original organization into "a regional nonprofit news network serving Kansas and Missouri and their original organization, renamed "The Kansas City Beacon".

I'm thinking of doing the following:

Rename the existing Wikipedia article from "The Beacon (Kansas City)" to "The Kansas City Beacon".
Modify the existing Wikidata item to match the name change in Wikipedia.
Create a new Wikidata item for "The Beacon (Kansas-Missouri nonprofit news network)", which would be the parent organization (P749) of "The Kansas City Beacon", with the latter being a business division (P199) of this new Wikidata item. An alternative would have this new "The Beacon (Kansas-Missouri nonprofit news network)" having "The Kansas City Beacon" as a has subsidiary (P355), with the subsidiary being owned by (P127) this new Wikidata item. I'm not sure if parent-division is preferable in this context to owner-subsidiary, but I think it is ... and I'm not convinced it's worth (or appropriate) to use both. Since these are all nonprofits, parent-division seems more appropriate than owner-subsidiary. However, I'd be happier if I had input on this.
Create a new Wikidata item for "The Wichita Beacon", and replicate the parent-division (or owner-subsidiary) structure just described.

However, before I did this, I felt a need to document this suggested workflow to see if one of the leaders of Wikiproject Periodicals might like to suggest something a little different. Thanks, DavidMCEddy (talk) 04:04, 24 October 2021 (UTC)

Invitation to WikidataCon workshop on bibliographic data

Hi

Notified participants of WikiProject Periodicals!

I hope you're getting excited about WikidataCon 2021 even if it's going to be virtual this time around. I'll be joining you from Topsham, England where User:Sic19, curator of the WikiCite track, will be hosting me!

I was wondering who was thinking of joining the workshop on pre-ISBN/ISSN bibliographic data that I'll be leading with another database builder/bibliographer, Demian Katz? On Sunday, 14:30-15:30 UTC (10:30 Eastern North America, 15:30 Central Europe, check for other time zones), we'll be looking for fields to add to better capture the challenges posed by translations, series of works, and works serialized in installments.

We also see it as a way of kickstarting what we hope will be an ongoing conversation between data nerds of all stripes regarding books and periodicals. You can check out the design of the workshop and let me know if you think it's missing something. I'm also looking for someone who could present the various communication channels used by the Wikidata community. Apart from the WikiProject Talk pages, Simon mentioned Telegram channels, also pointing out more assiduous users might be more apt to talk about them, =P

Looking forward to meeting the most of you possible on Sunday! Marianika (talk) 09:21, 26 October 2021 (UTC)

@Marianika could you please cross-post to the Wikisource Scriptorium? One of the primary roadblocks to Wikidata use at Wikisource is a lack of clarity over data modelling for collective works, periodicals, serials, etc. Inductiveload (talk) 10:19, 27 October 2021 (UTC)

Hi @Inductiveload! Just saw this and went to publish an announcement there... I hope I've put it in the right place... Will we be seeing you tomorrow? Marianika (talk) 08:23, 30 October 2021 (UTC)

@Marianika Yes, perfect, thanks. I'm not sure if I can make it: I will try. Inductiveload (talk) 10:24, 30 October 2021 (UTC)

Add meta information?

Under the list of potential properties for a journal, should we link to sites that give analysis of that periodical rather than just "cold hard facts" for example

Media Bias/Fact Check ID P9852 Back ache (talk) 09:56, 3 December 2021 (UTC)

Modeling zines and samizdat

As far as I can tell, there isn't a WikiProject for modeling zines in Wikidata yet, so hopefully this is the right place to ask about this. How can we consistently indicate that a periodical was distributed as a zine or samizdat? Should that go into instance of (P31), distribution format (P437), has characteristic (P1552), some other property?

Some examples of how zines are currently modeled:

Vice Versa (Q7925084) has instance of (P31) magazine (Q41298) and publisher (P123) Lisa Ben (Q6557806) (so you can sort of infer that it was self-published)
Maximum Rocknroll (Q1914259) has instance of (P31) fanzine (Q181298)
Punk Rock Confidential (Q7260387) has instance of (P31) lifestyle magazine (Q6545508) and newspaper format (P3912) fanzine (Q181298) (which seems like an incorrect use of that property)

Ballerlikemahler (talk) 17:58, 16 January 2022 (UTC)

multi-part articles that span across issues

Hi, how do we handle articles that were published in several parts, in two or more issues (and maybe volumes)? Here are two examples:

In one case the info about issues/pages is handled as qualifiers for published in (P1433), in the other issue (P433) is used, which looks cleaner. Are there any guidelines for cases like this? --Jonas kork (talk) 14:43, 22 March 2022 (UTC)

@Jonas kork: Second example looks cleaner to me. However if it was across several volumes then you might need to go with the volume case. But then the page number info is ambiguous. Not sure. ArthurPSmith (talk) 16:36, 22 March 2022 (UTC)

I now came across Wikidata:Forum/Archiv/2016/10#Zweiteiliger_Aufsatz and (without response) Wikidata:Project_chat/Archive/2016/10#Scientific_articles,_published_in_part. The example given there (Daseinskampf und gegenseitige Hilfe in der Entwicklung (Q19154093)) uses two P1433 statements, packing issues and page numbers into qualifiers. My impression is that each of the three ways used to represent the parts of the article could be misinterpreted as reprints of the same article. Apparently, there is no established cure for this. --Jonas kork (talk) 07:43, 30 March 2022 (UTC)

Pochspiel: an “International” Card Game of the 15th Century (Q111312615) now showcases both the use of issue (P433) (several statements, each with page numbers as qualifier) and published in (P1433) (single statement, a mess of qualifiers giving issues and pages).
Jeux de hasard sur papier : les «loteries» de salon (Q111293309) uses just the P433 statements with qualifiers to give details about the parts (P1433 is without qualifiers).
Daseinskampf und gegenseitige Hilfe in der Entwicklung (Q19154093) uses just P1433, with separate statements for each part of the article, each with qualifiers for volume, issue, pages, and series ordinal.

I will probably edit my examples (#1 an #2) to follow the model of #3. Thoughts? Also, how and where can we best keep a record of this solution/model? --Jonas kork (talk) 07:56, 30 March 2022 (UTC)

@Jonas kork: That seems like a good solution - it might also be possible to add a applies to part (P518) qualifier to each statement if there are appropriate items to distinguish the two parts? And you can update the main project page (rather than this talk page) with the proposed change to keep a record of it - just add a section on articles published in several parts. ArthurPSmith (talk) 17:19, 30 March 2022 (UTC)

Done. Thanks for the feedback an encouragement! --Jonas kork (talk) 06:18, 3 April 2022 (UTC)

Limited general properties

Notified participants of WikiProject Periodicals

Hi y'all,

Right now, Wikidata:WikiProject Periodicals/numbers/journals/general properties only has 6 properties (hardcoded in the SPARQL query, the query had a small bug that I just fixed BTW). Why not include all common properties? With a slight change in the query, we could easily include all properties used more than 1000 times : https://w.wiki/5H2a (there is 62 right now, a bit raw, we might want to exclude or at least separate all the identifiers for instance, I'm open to suggestions and remarks).

What do you think, would it be a good or a bad idea?

Cheers, VIGNERON (talk) 18:54, 13 June 2022 (UTC)

@VIGNERON: I'm not sure what the purpose of that "general properties" list is, but your suggestion seems fine to me. ArthurPSmith (talk) 19:09, 13 June 2022 (UTC)

@VIGNERON: good idea :-) --Mfchris84 (talk) 11:02, 14 June 2022 (UTC)

Notability of newspaper articles

Notified participants of WikiProject Periodicals Hi all! Recently @Gerwoman: has reported me that @LAP959: is creating some items for newspaper articles; Gerwoman and I tend to think that they could be outside of WD:N (and thus should be deleted), but since I haven't found specific guidelines about the notability of newspaper articles (Wikidata:WikiProject Journalism just redirects to an abandoned Wikidata:WikiProject Journalists), I open this discussion in order to establish some sort of guideline about them. Please express your opinion. Thanks, --Epìdosis 15:32, 6 July 2022 (UTC)

-Epìdosis, I try to be guided by the ideas of Wikidata as a repository of sources presented at the WikidataCon in 2017 (video WikiCite: Wikidata as a structured repository of bibliographic data - Talk at WikidataCon 2017 ) Like books, and scholarly articles, newspaper articles from reliable sources provide the references needed to justify claims, complete with the appropriate metadata (title, author, publisher, date of publication, topics). They can be cited in Wikidata and, maybe in the future, across other projects as well. LAP959 (talk) 15:57, 6 July 2022 (UTC)

Calling also @Veverve: who reported a case. --Gerwoman (talk) 16:16, 6 July 2022 (UTC)

WD:N says NOTHING about whether the source is "reliable": only that "It fulfills a structural need". (That's the third of three criteria cited in WD:N. It seems to me that the first two are special cases of this third criterion.)

More generally, I'm opposed to deleting references, particularly in Wikidata.

I know that w:Wikipedia:Deprecated sources encourages people to delete references to sources officially deprecated. I think it's appropriate and necessary to discuss the relative credibility of specific sources and articles. Wikipedia:Reliability of Wikipedia notes that Wikipedia is virtually unique in getting people with very different perspectives to collaborate in crafting a description of the subject at hand that all sides can more or less live with. In that context, deleting references is an obstacle to that kind of debate.

The best research that I know relating to that is The Wisdom of Polarized Crowds (Q47248083): The authors did a content analysis of all edits to English Wikipedia articles relating to politics, social issues and science from its start to December 1, 2016, roughly 5 percent of the English Wikipedia. They found that the best articles tended to have the most diverse groups of editors. They said that 95 percent of articles could benefit from more conflict; only 5 percent of articles had conflict that on balance was counterproductive.

In sum, we need more and more diverse editors on Wikipedia. Deprecating sources, in my judgment, drives away people we should be cultivating and engaging in serious discussion about the credibility of the sources they want to cite. We should NOT be deleting references they think are credible.

An example of this stupidity: Wikipedia:Kris Kobach#Political positions, accessed 2022-07-06, says, "In October 2017, Kobach wrote a column in Breitbart News which said that immigrants commit a disproportionate share of crimes, ... [citing] a column by Peter Gemma, who is associated with white supremacist groups and the American Holocaust denial movement." That passage in Wikipedia cites an article in the w:Kansas City Star but NEITHER of the two articles in Breitbart in question. How stupid is that? I'm positively discouraged from checking the source on Breitbart myself. I'm supposed to accept the claims of the author of that Kansas City Star article and the Wikipedia editor who posted that summary. To me, that's an attack on the spirit and intent of Wikipedia: I think we should be engaging people who believe Breitbart in honest dialog, to the extent that they are willing to discuss the evidence relating to the claims in those articles. We should NOT be driving them away by deleting references they find credible.

But the standards for notability on Wikidata (WD:N) are much looser than those on Wikipedia: "An item is acceptable [for Wikidata] if and only if ... it meets at least one of" three criteria, and the first two are special cases of the third: "It fulfills a structural need". Thus, for example, w:Breitbart News is deprecated per w:Wikipedia:Deprecated sources, but it has a Wikipedia article and a Wikidata item (Q4960434), and I think that's appropriate. DavidMCEddy (talk) 16:41, 6 July 2022 (UTC)

It is my belief none of those items meet WD:N. Wikdata is not here to gather each and every news article. Some news articles are notable as per pt. 2 of WD:N, e.g. Q111516801, because they are discussed by third party reliable sources. Veverve (talk) 17:31, 6 July 2022 (UTC)

I'm on the fence and in between... Currently they do not exactly meet WD:N (not the ones I've seen at least) but they do have potential value. Linking an article to its periodicals and the periodicals to its articles is not enough to meet the 3rd criteria (it's obvious and tautologic ; almost self-referencing). Following @DavidMCEddy: maybe we could make WD:N more explicit to precise that "a structural need" need to be at least a little meaningful, for instance for articles to be actually used as article. In the end, I'm not in favour of deletion but rather of deleting only the articles that are not really used (and leaving some times to LAP959 to used them, obviously). Cheers, VIGNERON (talk) 17:58, 6 July 2022 (UTC)

@VIGNERON: the thing is, LAP959 created items for news article which are useless, only to use said useless items with Property:P1343; this loophole makes them serve a structural need. See for example Q112939802 being used in Q3954094. It is not useful to catalogue each and every news article discussing each and every topic, especially ones widely known and discussed; we already have encyclopedia items for this purpose. Veverve (talk) 18:12, 6 July 2022 (UTC)

@Veverve: there are unused (except - I agree with you - for obvious uses that indeed doesn't count) but I don't think they are useless. Let's take an example: Ireland: a woman dies after being prevented from having an abortion (Irlande : une femme meurt après avoir été empêchée d'avorter) (Q112891907) was totally unused, but I add it as a reference on Q5247527#P570 (which was unreferenced so far, only a link to English Wikipedia which is not a source) and Q5247527#P509 (which has citation-needed constraint (Q54554025)), it could be used for many other statements, this article contains a lot of data that could serve as references (and thus making Wikidata actually smaller than using the same url and metadata each time). Cheers, VIGNERON (talk) 18:33, 6 July 2022 (UTC)

The world has a major problem today with political polarization, e.g., the 6 January w:2021 United States Capitol attack. w:Robert W. McChesney's solution is to dramatically increase the number of local news outlets. (See, e.g.,The Local Journalism Initiative: a proposal to protect and extend democracy (Q109978060) or To Protect and Extend Democracy, Recreate Local News Media (Q109978337).)

A definition of "notability" that is too narrow is a form of censorship. The international big money interests who are funding the most divisive media in the world today would LOVE to pay trolls to use Wikimedia Foundation criteria for WD:N or Wikipedia:Wikipedia:Deprecated sources as tools to censor information they don't like.

They'd also be happy with Wikimedia Foundation projects convincing their followers that Wikipedia is biased against them. DavidMCEddy (talk) 20:22, 6 July 2022 (UTC)

If a newspaper article is used as a reference for other substantive information (somebody's birth date, citizenship, employment, etc.) then I think it is fine to have that source article as an item in itself. If there is no use of the article as a reference then I don't think it should be considered notable on its own, and if we need to update the notability guidelines for this specific case (or the slightly more general case of small works that may be used as references) I think that would be fine. ArthurPSmith (talk) 21:12, 6 July 2022 (UTC)

If an individual newspaper article is not used as a reference for anything, then I don't see a problem with it not being in Wikidata, provided we allow time between when someone creates a Wikidata item for a newspaper article and the time they cite it someplace. For example, 1.5 years ago I translated the Wikipedia article on w:Julia Cagé from French into Spanish. In the process, I pressed "post" before I intended to, the article was speedily deleted, and I got blocked from editing on the Spanish-language Wikipedia. Almost three months later, I finally overcame that block, and the es:w:Julia Cagé article was published.

I mention that to say that I think we should not be too trigger happy to delete things from Wikidata if someone claims they plan to use them.

I'd like to ask another question: There's a U.S. Newspaper Directory, 1690-Present maintained by the Library of Congress. The database currently contains 157,521 items. I recently downloaded the entire database and learned that "end_year" = 9999 in 13 percent of the cases. Clearly there are data quality problems. I'd like to see a relationship between Wikidata and this database be developed that would allow people to clean up the Wikidata items to improve that database. For many of these cases with "end_year" = 9999, other information is available to tell whether that newspaper is still publishing, and if not what the actual "end_year" was. In any event, having data like that in Wikidata makes it possible to crowd source data cleaning.

Comments? Thanks, DavidMCEddy (talk) 22:18, 6 July 2022 (UTC)

How do you plan to determine whether an item about a newsppaer article is used as a citation on one of the Wikipedias, for example via Template:Cite Q (Q22321052)? Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 11:34, 7 July 2022 (UTC)

Some of your comments are changing my mind, but this is what I thought a few days ago: One article deserves an item in WD if it has some notability by itself. For example a Pulizer Prize or something like that. Here some examples: https://www.aarweb.org/AARMBR/About-AAR-/Award-Programs-/Awards/Journalism-Award-Winners-and-Sample-Articles.aspx https://www.npr.org/2022/05/09/1097668290/2022-pulitzer-prize-news-winners?t=1657034095607 Not every article about a relevant event is per se a relevant item for Wikidata. --Gerwoman (talk) 16:01, 7 July 2022 (UTC) In favor of the notability of all published articles ever, if we really want to "sum all human knowledge". Nomen ad hoc (talk) 06:37, 8 July 2022 (UTC).

I am all for news articles having their own entries whether they are used as references in other Wikidata items or not. I imagine one day we will be able to crawl through all the public domain newspaper archives with an AI and create entries for every obituary and funeral notice. The newspaper archive GenealogyBank recently did just that and the index is at Familysearch. That prompted Ancestry.com to do the same with their newspaper.com website, and index the same and include wedding announcements, and even ascertain the relationships between the people mentioned. It would be similar to the guy that extracted all the images for Commons from books scanned at the Internet Archive and grabbed any adjacent text for context. --RAN (talk) 19:06, 30 July 2022 (UTC)

[1] They doubtless know that since 2004 newspapers in the US have lost 70 percent of their advertising revenue. They've cut the number of journalists they employ in half. A quarter have ceased publication, and many of the ones that continue are publishing less. News Deserts and Ghost Newspapers: Will local news survive? (Q100251717)

[1]

Wikidata talk:WikiProject Periodicals/Archive 3

Contents

Adding Price One Penny data about 19th-century penny weekly literature

Bulletin of the United States National Museum (take 2)

Dates for magazine/journal volumes

Conflation of journals and volumes, misleading copyright status values

Part of (P361) or Part of series (P179) for volumes

Dates for periodicals volumes (take 2)

Suggest to use "periodical volume" rather than "volume"

Journal of Apicultural Research and Bee World

Asking trade organizations of news publishers re. Wikidata?

Need a property for "Newspaper of record"

managing name change?

Invitation to WikidataCon workshop on bibliographic data

Add meta information?

Modeling zines and samizdat

multi-part articles that span across issues

Limited general properties

Notability of newspaper articles

Navigation menu

Wikidata talk:WikiProject Periodicals/Archive 3

Adding Price One Penny data about 19th-century penny weekly literature

Bulletin of the United States National Museum (take 2)

Dates for magazine/journal volumes

Conflation of journals and volumes, misleading copyright status values

Part of (P361) or Part of series (P179) for volumes

Dates for periodicals volumes (take 2)

Suggest to use "periodical volume" rather than "volume"

Journal of Apicultural Research and Bee World

Asking trade organizations of news publishers re. Wikidata?

Need a property for "Newspaper of record"

managing name change?

Invitation to WikidataCon workshop on bibliographic data

Add meta information?

Modeling zines and samizdat

multi-part articles that span across issues

Limited general properties

Notability of newspaper articles

Navigation menu

Search