User talk:LucyCrompton-Reid (WMUK)
May 2017
[edit]
Hello, I'm SummerPhDv2.0. I noticed that you made a change to an article, Tomboy, but you didn't provide a reliable source. It's been removed and archived in the page history for now, but if you'd like to include a citation and re-add it, please do so! If you need guidance on referencing, please see the referencing for beginners tutorial, or if you think I made a mistake, you can leave me a message on my talk page. Thank you. SummerPhDv2.0 16:48, 16 May 2017 (UTC)
Facto Post – Issue 3 – 11 August 2017
[edit]Facto Post – Issue 3 – 11 August 2017
 Wikimania report[edit]Interviewed by Facto Post at the hackathon, Lydia Pintscher of Wikidata said that the most significant recent development is that Wikidata now accounts for one third of Wikimedia edits. And the essential growth of human editing.  Impressive development work on Internet-in-a-Box featured in the WikiMedFoundation annual conference on Thursday. Hardware is Raspberry Pi, running Linux and the Kiwix browser. It can operate as a wifi hotspot and support a local intranet in parts of the world lacking phone signal. The medical use case is for those delivering care, who have smartphones but have to function in clinics in just such areas with few reference resources. Wikipedia medical content can be served to their phones, and power supplied by standard lithium battery packages. Yesterday Katherine Maher unveiled the draft Wikimedia 2030 strategy, featuring a picturesque metaphor, "roads, bridges and villages". Here "bridges" could do with illustration. Perhaps it stands for engineering round or over the obstacles to progress down the obvious highways. Internet-in-a-Box would then do fine as an example. "Bridging the gap" explains a take on that same metaphor, with its human component. If you are at Wikimania, come talk to WikiFactMine at its stall in the Community Village, just by the 3D-printed display for Bassel Khartabil; come hear T Arrow talk at 3 pm today in Drummond West, Level 3. Link[edit]
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MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 10:55, 12 August 2017 (UTC)
Facto Post – Issue 4 – 18 September 2017
[edit]Facto Post – Issue 4 – 18 September 2017
Editorial: Conservation data[edit]The IUCN Red List update of 14 September led with a threat to North American ash trees. The International Union for Conservation of Nature produces authoritative species listings that are peer-reviewed. Examples used as metonyms for loss of species and biodiversity, and discussion of extinction rates, are the usual topics covered in the media to inform us about this area. But actual data matters.  Clearly, conservation work depends on decisions about what should be done, and where. While animals, particularly mammals, are photogenic, species numbers run into millions. Plant species lie at the base of typical land-based food chains, and vegetation is key to the habitats of most animals. ContentMine dictionaries, for example as tabulated at d:Wikidata:WikiFactMine/Dictionary list, enable detailed control of queries about endangered species, in their taxonomic context. To target conservation measures properly, species listings running into the thousands are not what is needed: range maps showing current distribution are. Between the will to act, and effective steps taken, the services of data handling are required. There is now no reason at all why Wikidata should not take up the burden. Links[edit]
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MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 14:46, 18 September 2017 (UTC)
Draft:Inua Ellams concern
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Facto Post – Issue 5 – 17 October 2017
[edit]Facto Post – Issue 5 – 17 October 2017
Editorial: Annotations[edit]Annotation is nothing new. The glossators of medieval Europe annotated between the lines, or in the margins of legal manuscripts of texts going back to Roman times, and created a new discipline. In the form of web annotation, the idea is back, with texts being marked up inline, or with a stand-off system. Where could it lead?  ContentMine operates in the field of text and data mining (TDM), where annotation, simply put, can add value to mined text. It now sees annotation as a possible advance in semi-automation, the use of human judgement assisted by bot editing, which now plays a large part in Wikidata tools. While a human judgement call of yes/no, on the addition of a statement to Wikidata, is usually taken as decisive, it need not be. The human assent may be passed into an annotation system, and stored: this idea is standard on Wikisource, for example, where text is considered "validated" only when two different accounts have stated that the proof-reading is correct. A typical application would be to require more than one person to agree that what is said in the reference translates correctly into the formal Wikidata statement. Rejections are also potentially useful to record, for machine learning. As a contribution to data integrity on Wikidata, annotation has much to offer. Some "hard cases" on importing data are much more difficult than average. There are for example biographical puzzles: whether person A in one context is really identical with person B, of the same name, in another context. In science, clinical medicine require special attention to sourcing (WP:MEDRS), and is challenging in terms of connecting findings with the methodology employed. Currently decisions in areas such as these, on Wikipedia and Wikidata, are often made ad hoc. In particular there may be no audit trail for those who want to check what is decided. Annotations are subject to a World Wide Web Consortium standard, and behind the terminology constitute a simple JSON data structure. What WikiFactMine proposes to do with them is to implement the MEDRS guideline, as a formal algorithm, on bibliographical and methodological data. The structure will integrate with those inputs the human decisions on the interpretation of scientific papers that underlie claims on Wikidata. What is added to Wikidata will therefore be supported by a transparent and rigorous system that documents decisions. An example of the possible future scope of annotation, for medical content, is in the first link below. That sort of detailed abstract of a publication can be a target for TDM, adds great value, and could be presented in machine-readable form. You are invited to discuss the detailed proposal on Wikidata, via its talk page. Links[edit]
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MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 08:46, 17 October 2017 (UTC)
Facto Post – Issue 6 – 15 November 2017
[edit]Facto Post – Issue 6 – 15 November 2017
WikidataCon Berlin 28–9 October 2017[edit] Under the heading rerum causas cognescere, the first ever Wikidata conference got under way in the Tagesspiegel building with two keynotes, One was on YAGO, about how a knowledge base conceived ten years ago if you assume automatic compilation from Wikipedia. The other was from manager Lydia Pintscher, on the "state of the data". Interesting rumours flourished: the mix'n'match tool and its 600+ datasets, mostly in digital humanities, to be taken off the hands of its author Magnus Manske by the WMF; a Wikibase incubator site is on its way. Announcements came in talks: structured data on Wikimedia Commons is scheduled to make substantive progress by 2019. The lexeme development on Wikidata is now not expected to make the Wiktionary sites redundant, but may facilitate automated compilation of dictionaries.  And so it went, with five strands of talks and workshops, through to 11 pm on Saturday. Wikidata applies to GLAM work via metadata. It may be used in education, raises issues such as author disambiguation, and lends itself to different types of graphical display and reuse. Many millions of SPARQL queries are run on the site every day. Over the summer a large open science bibliography has come into existence there. Wikidata's fifth birthday party on the Sunday brought matters to a close. See a dozen and more reports by other hands. Links[edit]
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MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 10:02, 15 November 2017 (UTC)
Facto Post – Issue 7 – 15 December 2017
[edit]Facto Post – Issue 7 – 15 December 2017
A new bibliographical landscape[edit]At the beginning of December, Wikidata items on individual scientific articles passed the 10 million mark. This figure contrasts with the state of play in early summer, when there were around half a million. In the big picture, Wikidata is now documenting the scientific literature at a rate that is about eight times as fast as papers are published. As 2017 ends, progress is quite evident. Behind this achievement are a technical advance (fatameh), and bots that do the lifting. Much more than dry migration of metadata is potentially involved, however. If paper A cites paper B, both papers having an item, a link can be created on Wikidata, and the information presented to both human readers, and machines. This cross-linking is one of the most significant aspects of the scientific literature, and now a long-sought open version is rapidly being built up.  The effort for the lifting of copyright restrictions on citation data of this kind has had real momentum behind it during 2017. WikiCite and the I4OC have been pushing hard, with the result that on CrossRef over 50% of the citation data is open. Now the holdout publishers are being lobbied to release rights on citations. But all that is just the beginning. Topics of papers are identified, authors disambiguated, with significant progress on the use of the four million ORCID IDs for researchers, and proposals formulated to identify methodology in a machine-readable way. P4510 on Wikidata has been introduced so that methodology can sit comfortably on items about papers. More is on the way. OABot applies the unpaywall principle to Wikipedia referencing. It has been proposed that Wikidata could assist WorldCat in compiling the global history of book translation. Watch this space. And make promoting #1lib1ref one of your New Year's resolutions. Happy holidays, all!  Links[edit]
Editor Charles Matthews, for ContentMine. Please leave feedback for him. Back numbers are here. Reminder: WikiFactMine pages on Wikidata are at WD:WFM. If you wish to receive no further issues of Facto Post, please remove your name from our mailing list. Alternatively, to opt out of all massmessage mailings, you may add Category:Wikipedians who opt out of message delivery to your user talk page.
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MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 14:54, 15 December 2017 (UTC)
Facto Post – Issue 8 – 15 January 2018
[edit]Facto Post – Issue 8 – 15 January 2018
Metadata on the March[edit]From the days of hard-copy liner notes on music albums, metadata have stood outside a piece or file, while adding to understanding of where it comes from, and some of what needs to be appreciated about its content. In the GLAM sector, the accumulation of accurate metadata for objects is key to the mission of an institution, and its presentation in cataloguing. Today Wikipedia turns 17, with worlds still to conquer. Zooming out from the individual GLAM object to the ontology in which it is set, one such world becomes apparent: GLAMs use custom ontologies, and those introduce massive incompatibilities. From a recent article by sadads, we quote the observation that "vocabularies needed for many collections, topics and intellectual spaces defy the expectations of the larger professional communities." A job for the encyclopedist, certainly. But the data-minded Wikimedian has the advantages of Wikidata, starting with its multilingual data, and facility with aliases. The controlled vocabulary — sometimes referred to as a "thesaurus" as term of art — simplifies search: if a "spade" must be called that, rather than "shovel", it is easier to find all spade references. That control comes at a cost.   Case studies in that article show what can lie ahead. The schema crosswalk, in jargon, is a potential answer to the GLAM Babel of proliferating and expanding vocabularies. Even if you have no interest in Wikidata as such, simply vocabularies V and W, if both V and W are matched to Wikidata, then a "crosswalk" arises from term v in V to w in W, whenever v and w both match to the same item d in Wikidata. For metadata mobility, match to Wikidata. It's apparently that simple: infrastructure requirements have turned out, so far, to be challenges that can be met. Links[edit]
Editor Charles Matthews, for ContentMine. Please leave feedback for him. Back numbers are here. Reminder: WikiFactMine pages on Wikidata are at WD:WFM. If you wish to receive no further issues of Facto Post, please remove your name from our mailing list. Alternatively, to opt out of all massmessage mailings, you may add Category:Wikipedians who opt out of message delivery to your user talk page.
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MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 12:38, 15 January 2018 (UTC)
Facto Post – Issue 9 – 5 February 2018
[edit]Facto Post – Issue 9 – 5 February 2018
Wikidata as Hub[edit]One way of looking at Wikidata relates it to the semantic web concept, around for about as long as Wikipedia, and realised in dozens of distributed Web institutions. It sees Wikidata as supplying central, encyclopedic coverage of linked structured data, and looks ahead to greater support for "federated queries" that draw together information from all parts of the emerging network of websites.  Another perspective might be likened to a photographic negative of that one: Wikidata as an already-functioning Web hub. Over half of its properties are identifiers on other websites. These are Wikidata's "external links", to use Wikipedia terminology: one type for the DOI of a publication, another for the VIAF page of an author, with thousands more such. Wikidata links out to sites that are not nominally part of the semantic web, effectively drawing them into a larger system. The crosswalk possibilities of the systematic construction of these links was covered in Issue 8. Wikipedia:External links speaks of them as kept "minimal, meritable, and directly relevant to the article." Here Wikidata finds more of a function. On viaf.org one can type a VIAF author identifier into the search box, and find the author page. The Wikidata Resolver tool, these days including Open Street Map, Scholia etc., allows this kind of lookup. The hub tool by maxlath takes a major step further, allowing both lookup and crosswalk to be encoded in a single URL. Links[edit]
Editor Charles Matthews, for ContentMine. Please leave feedback for him. Back numbers are here. Reminder: WikiFactMine pages on Wikidata are at WD:WFM. If you wish to receive no further issues of Facto Post, please remove your name from our mailing list. Alternatively, to opt out of all massmessage mailings, you may add Category:Wikipedians who opt out of message delivery to your user talk page.
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MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 11:50, 5 February 2018 (UTC)
Facto Post – Issue 10 – 12 March 2018
[edit]Facto Post – Issue 10 – 12 March 2018
Milestone for mix'n'match[edit]Around the time in February when Wikidata clicked past item Q50000000, another milestone was reached: the mix'n'match tool uploaded its 1000th dataset. Concisely defined by its author, Magnus Manske, it works "to match entries in external catalogs to Wikidata". The total number of entries is now well into eight figures, and more are constantly being added: a couple of new catalogs each day is normal. Since the end of 2013, mix'n'match has gradually come to play a significant part in adding statements to Wikidata. Particularly in areas with the flavour of digital humanities, but datasets can of course be about practically anything. There is a catalog on skyscrapers, and two on spiders. These days mix'n'match can be used in numerous modes, from the relaxed gamified click through a catalog looking for matches, with prompts, to the fantastically useful and often demanding search across all catalogs. I'll type that again: you can search 1000+ datasets from the simple box at the top right. The drop-down menu top left offers "creation candidates", Magnus's personal favourite. m:Mix'n'match/Manual for more. For the Wikidatan, a key point is that these matches, however carried out, add statements to Wikidata if, and naturally only if, there is a Wikidata property associated with the catalog. For everyone, however, the hands-on experience of deciding of what is a good match is an education, in a scholarly area, biographical catalogs being particularly fraught. Underpinning recent rapid progress is an open infrastructure for scraping and uploading. Congratulations to Magnus, our data Stakhanovite! Links[edit]
Editor Charles Matthews, for ContentMine. Please leave feedback for him. Back numbers are here. Reminder: WikiFactMine pages on Wikidata are at WD:WFM. If you wish to receive no further issues of Facto Post, please remove your name from our mailing list. Alternatively, to opt out of all massmessage mailings, you may add Category:Wikipedians who opt out of message delivery to your user talk page.
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MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 12:26, 12 March 2018 (UTC)
Facto Post – Issue 11 – 9 April 2018
[edit]Facto Post – Issue 11 – 9 April 2018
The 100 Skins of the Onion[edit]Open Citations Month, with its eminently guessable hashtag, is upon us. We should be utterly grateful that in the past 12 months, so much data on which papers cite which other papers has been made open, and that Wikidata is playing its part in hosting it as "cites" statements. At the time of writing, there are 15.3M Wikidata items that can do that. Pulling back to look at open access papers in the large, though, there is is less reason for celebration. Access in theory does not yet equate to practical access. A recent LSE IMPACT blogpost puts that issue down to "heterogeneity". A useful euphemism to save us from thinking that the whole concept doesn't fall into the realm of the oxymoron. Some home truths: aggregation is not content management, if it falls short on reusability. The PDF file format is wedded to how humans read documents, not how machines ingest them. The salami-slicer is our friend in the current downloading of open access papers, but for a better metaphor, think about skinning an onion, laboriously, 100 times with diminishing returns. There are of the order of 100 major publisher sites hosting open access papers, and the predominant offer there is still a PDF.  From the discoverability angle, Wikidata's bibliographic resources combined with the SPARQL query are superior in principle, by far, to existing keyword searches run over papers. Open access content should be managed into consistent HTML, something that is currently strenuous. The good news, such as it is, would be that much of it is already in XML. The organisational problem of removing further skins from the onion, with sensible prioritisation, is certainly not insuperable. The CORE group (the bloggers in the LSE posting) has some answers, but actually not all that is needed for the text and data mining purposes they highlight. The long tail, or in other words the onion heart when it has become fiddly beyond patience to skin, does call for a pis aller. But the real knack is to do more between the XML and the heart. Links[edit]
Editor Charles Matthews, for ContentMine. Please leave feedback for him. Back numbers are here. Reminder: WikiFactMine pages on Wikidata are at WD:WFM. If you wish to receive no further issues of Facto Post, please remove your name from our mailing list. Alternatively, to opt out of all massmessage mailings, you may add Category:Wikipedians who opt out of message delivery to your user talk page.
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MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 16:25, 9 April 2018 (UTC)
Facto Post – Issue 12 – 28 May 2018
[edit]Facto Post – Issue 12 – 28 May 2018
ScienceSource funded[edit]The Wikimedia Foundation announced full funding of the ScienceSource grant proposal from ContentMine on May 18. See the ScienceSource Twitter announcement and 60 second video.
The proposal includes downloading 30,000 open access papers, aiming (roughly speaking) to create a baseline for medical referencing on Wikipedia. It leaves open the question of how these are to be chosen. The basic criteria of WP:MEDRS include a concentration on secondary literature. Attention has to be given to the long tail of diseases that receive less current research. The MEDRS guideline supposes that edge cases will have to be handled, and the premature exclusion of publications that would be in those marginal positions would reduce the value of the collection. Prophylaxis misses the point that gate-keeping will be done by an algorithm. Two well-known but rather different areas where such considerations apply are tropical diseases and alternative medicine. There are also a number of potential downloading troubles, and these were mentioned in Issue 11. There is likely to be a gap, even with the guideline, between conditions taken to be necessary but not sufficient, and conditions sufficient but not necessary, for candidate papers to be included. With around 10,000 recognised medical conditions in standard lists, being comprehensive is demanding. With all of these aspects of the task, ScienceSource will seek community help. Links[edit]
Editor Charles Matthews, for ContentMine. Please leave feedback for him. Back numbers are here. Reminder: WikiFactMine pages on Wikidata are at WD:WFM. ScienceSource pages will be announced there, and in this mass message. If you wish to receive no further issues of Facto Post, please remove your name from our mailing list. Alternatively, to opt out of all massmessage mailings, you may add Category:Wikipedians who opt out of message delivery to your user talk page.
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MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 10:16, 28 May 2018 (UTC)
Facto Post – Issue 13 – 29 May 2018
[edit]Facto Post – Issue 13 – 29 May 2018
 The Editor is Charles Matthews, for ContentMine. Please leave feedback for him, on his User talk page.
To subscribe to Facto Post go to Wikipedia:Facto Post mailing list. For the ways to unsubscribe, see the footer.
Facto Post enters its second year, with a Cambridge Blue (OK, Aquamarine) background, a new logo, but no Cambridge blues. On-topic for the ScienceSource project is a project page here. It contains some case studies on how the WP:MEDRS guideline, for the referencing of articles at all related to human health, is applied in typical discussions. Close to home also, a template, called {{medrs}} for short, is used to express dissatisfaction with particular references. Technology can help with patrolling, and this Petscan query finds over 450 articles where there is at least one use of the template. Of course the template is merely suggesting there is a possible issue with the reliability of a reference. Deciding the truth of the allegation is another matter. This maintenance issue is one example of where ScienceSource aims to help. Where the reference is to a scientific paper, its type of algorithm could give a pass/fail opinion on such references. It could assist patrollers of medical articles, therefore, with the templated references and more generally. There may be more to proper referencing than that, indeed: context, quite what the statement supported by the reference expresses, prominence and weight. For that kind of consideration, case studies can help. But an algorithm might help to clear the backlog. 
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MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 18:19, 29 June 2018 (UTC)
Facto Post – Issue 14 – 21 July 2018
[edit]| Facto Post – Issue 14 – 21 July 2018
The Editor is Charles Matthews, for ContentMine. Please leave feedback for him, on his User talk page.
To subscribe to Facto Post go to Wikipedia:Facto Post mailing list. For the ways to unsubscribe, see the footer.
Officially it is "bridging the gaps in knowledge", with Wikimania 2018 in Cape Town paying tribute to the southern African concept of ubuntu to implement it. Besides face-to-face interactions, Wikimedians do need their power sources.  Facto Post interviewed Jdforrester, who has attended every Wikimania, and now works as Senior Product Manager for the Wikimedia Foundation. His take on tackling the gaps in the Wikimedia movement is that "if we were an army, we could march in a column and close up all the gaps". In his view though, that is a faulty metaphor, and it leads to a completely false misunderstanding of the movement, its diversity and different aspirations, and the nature of the work as "fighting" to be done in the open sector. There are many fronts, and as an eventualist he feels the gaps experienced both by editors and by users of Wikimedia content are inevitable. He would like to see a greater emphasis on reuse of content, not simply its volume. If that may not sound like radicalism, the Decolonizing the Internet conference here organized jointly with Whose Knowledge? can redress the picture. It comes with the claim to be "the first ever conference about centering marginalized knowledge online". 
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MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 06:10, 21 July 2018 (UTC)
Facto Post – Issue 15 – 21 August 2018
[edit]| Facto Post – Issue 15 – 21 August 2018
The Editor is Charles Matthews, for ContentMine. Please leave feedback for him, on his User talk page.
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.jpg) To grasp the nettle, there are rare diseases, there are tropical diseases and then there are "neglected diseases". Evidently a rare enough disease is likely to be neglected, but neglected disease these days means a disease not rare, but tropical, and most often infectious or parasitic. Rare diseases as a group are dominated, in contrast, by genetic diseases. A major aspect of neglect is found in tracking drug discovery. Orphan drugs are those developed to treat rare diseases (rare enough not to have market-driven research), but there is some overlap in practice with the WHO's neglected diseases, where snakebite, a "neglected public health issue", is on the list. From an encyclopedic point of view, lack of research also may mean lack of high-quality references: the core medical literature differs from primary research, since it operates by aggregating trials. This bibliographic deficit clearly hinders Wikipedia's mission. The ScienceSource project is currently addressing this issue, on Wikidata. Its Wikidata focus list at WD:SSFL is trying to ensure that neglect does not turn into bias in its selection of science papers.
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MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 13:23, 21 August 2018 (UTC)
Facto Post – Issue 16 – 30 September 2018
[edit]| Facto Post – Issue 16 – 30 September 2018
The Editor is Charles Matthews, for ContentMine. Please leave feedback for him, on his User talk page.
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 In an ideal world ... no, bear with your editor for just a minute ... there would be a format for scientific publishing online that was as much a standard as SI units are for the content. Likewise cataloguing publications would not be onerous, because part of the process would be to generate uniform metadata. Without claiming it could be the mythical free lunch, it might be reasonably be argued that sandwiches can be packaged much alike and have barcodes, whatever the fillings. The best on offer, to stretch the metaphor, is the meal kit option, in the form of XML. Where scientific papers are delivered as XML downloads, you get all the ingredients ready to cook. But have to prepare the actual meal of slow food yourself. See Scholarly HTML for a recent pass at heading off XML with HTML, in other words in the native language of the Web. The argument from real life is a traditional mixture of frictional forces, vested interests, and the classic irony of the principle of unripe time. On the other hand, discoverability actually diminishes with the prolific progress of science publishing. No, it really doesn't scale. Wikimedia as movement can do something in such cases. We know from open access, we grok the Web, we have our own horse in the HTML race, we have Wikidata and WikiJournal, and we have the chops to act. 
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MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 17:57, 30 September 2018 (UTC)
Facto Post – Issue 17 – 29 October 2018
[edit]| Facto Post – Issue 17 – 29 October 2018
The Editor is Charles Matthews, for ContentMine. Please leave feedback for him, on his User talk page.
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Around 2.7 million Wikidata items have an illustrative image. These files, you might say, are Wikimedia's stock images, and if the number is large, it is still only 5% or so of items that have one. All such images are taken from Wikimedia Commons, which has 50 million media files. One key issue is how to expand the stock. Indeed, there is a tool. WD-FIST exploits the fact that each Wikipedia is differently illustrated, mostly with images from Commons but also with fair use images. An item that has sitelinks but no illustrative image can be tested to see if the linked wikis have a suitable one. This works well for a volunteer who wants to add images at a reasonable scale, and a small amount of SPARQL knowledge goes a long way in producing checklists.  It should be noted, though, that there are currently 53 Wikidata properties that link to Commons, of which P18 for the basic image is just one. WD-FIST prompts the user to add signatures, plaques, pictures of graves and so on. There are a couple of hundred monograms, mostly of historical figures, and this query allows you to view all of them. commons:Category:Monograms and its subcategories provide rich scope for adding more. And so it is generally. The list of properties linking to Commons does contain a few that concern video and audio files, and rather more for maps. But it contains gems such as P3451 for "nighttime view". Over 1000 of those on Wikidata, but as for so much else, there could be yet more. Go on. Today is Wikidata's birthday. An illustrative image is always an acceptable gift, so why not add one? You can follow these easy steps: (i) log in at https://tools.wmflabs.org/widar/, (ii) paste the Petscan ID 6263583 into https://tools.wmflabs.org/fist/wdfist/ and click run, and (iii) just add cake. 
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MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 15:01, 29 October 2018 (UTC)
Facto Post – Issue 18 – 30 November 2018
[edit]| Facto Post – Issue 18 – 30 November 2018
The Editor is Charles Matthews, for ContentMine. Please leave feedback for him, on his User talk page.
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GLAM ♥ data — what is a gallery, library, archive or museum without a catalogue? It follows that Wikidata must love librarians. Bibliography supports students and researchers in any topic, but open and machine-readable bibliographic data even more so, outside the silo. Cue the WikiCite initiative, which was meeting in conference this week, in the Bay Area of California.  In fact there is a broad scope: "Open Knowledge Maps via SPARQL" and the "Sum of All Welsh Literature", identification of research outputs, Library.Link Network and Bibframe 2.0, OSCAR and LUCINDA (who they?), OCLC and Scholia, all these co-exist on the agenda. Certainly more library science is coming Wikidata's way. That poses the question about the other direction: is more Wikimedia technology advancing on libraries? Good point. Wikimedians generally are not aware of the tech background that can be assumed, unless they are close to current training for librarians. A baseline definition is useful here: "bash, git and OpenRefine". Compare and contrast with pywikibot, GitHub and mix'n'match. Translation: scripting for automation, version control, data set matching and wrangling in the large, are on the agenda also for contemporary library work. Certainly there is some possible common ground here. Time to understand rather more about the motivations that operate in the library sector.
Account creation is now open on the ScienceSource wiki, where you can see SPARQL visualisations of text mining.
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MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 11:20, 30 November 2018 (UTC)
Facto Post – Issue 19 – 27 December 2018
[edit]| Facto Post – Issue 19 – 27 December 2018
The Editor is Charles Matthews, for ContentMine. Please leave feedback for him, on his User talk page.
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Zotero is free software for reference management by the Center for History and New Media: see Wikipedia:Citing sources with Zotero. It is also an active user community, and has broad-based language support.  Besides the handiness of Zotero's warehousing of personal citation collections, the Zotero translator underlies the citoid service, at work behind the VisualEditor. Metadata from Wikidata can be imported into Zotero; and in the other direction the zotkat tool from the University of Mannheim allows Zotero bibliographies to be exported to Wikidata, by item creation. With an extra feature to add statements, that route could lead to much development of the focus list (P5008) tagging on Wikidata, by WikiProjects. There is also a large-scale encyclopedic dimension here. The construction of Zotero translators is one facet of Web scraping that has a strong community and open source basis. In that it resembles the less formal mix'n'match import community, and growing networks around other approaches that can integrate datasets into Wikidata, such as the use of OpenRefine. Looking ahead, the thirtieth birthday of the World Wide Web falls in 2019, and yet the ambition to make webpages routinely readable by machines can still seem an ever-retreating mirage. Wikidata should not only be helping Wikimedia integrate its projects, an ongoing process represented by Structured Data on Commons and lexemes. It should also be acting as a catalyst to bring scraping in from the cold, with institutional strengths as well as resourceful code.
Diversitech, the latest ContentMine grant application to the Wikimedia Foundation, is in its community review stage until January 2.
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MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 19:08, 27 December 2018 (UTC)
Facto Post – Issue 20 – 31 January 2019
[edit]| Facto Post – Issue 20 – 31 January 2019
The Editor is Charles Matthews, for ContentMine. Please leave feedback for him, on his User talk page.
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Recently Jimmy Wales has made the point that computer home assistants take much of their data from Wikipedia, one way or another. So as well as getting Spotify to play Frosty the Snowman for you, they may be able to answer the question "is the Pope Catholic?" Possibly by asking for disambiguation (Coptic?). Headlines about data breaches are now familiar, but the unannounced circulation of information raises other issues. One of those is Gresham's law stated as "bad data drives out good". Wikipedia and now Wikidata have been criticised on related grounds: what if their content, unattributed, is taken to have a higher standing than Wikimedians themselves would grant it? See Wikiquote on a misattribution to Bismarck for the usual quip about "law and sausages", and why one shouldn't watch them in the making. Wikipedia has now turned 18, so should act like as adult, as well as being treated like one. The Web itself turns 30 some time between March and November this year, per Tim Berners-Lee. If the Knowledge Graph by Google exemplifies Heraclitean Web technology gaining authority, contra GIGO, Wikimedians still have a role in its critique. But not just with the teenage skill of detecting phoniness. There is more to beating Gresham than exposing the factoid and urban myth, where WP:V does do a great job. Placeholders must be detected, and working with Wikidata is a good way to understand how having one statement as data can blind us to replacing it by a more accurate one. An example that is important to open access is that, firstly, the term itself needs considerable unpacking, because just being able to read material online is a poor relation of "open"; and secondly, trying to get Creative Commons license information into Wikidata shows up issues with classes of license (such as CC-BY) standing for the actual license in major repositories. Detailed investigation shows that "everything flows" exacerbates the issue. But Wikidata can solve it.
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MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 10:53, 31 January 2019 (UTC)
Facto Post – Issue 21 – 28 February 2019
[edit]| Facto Post – Issue 21 – 28 February 2019
The Editor is Charles Matthews, for ContentMine. Please leave feedback for him, on his User talk page.
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Systematic reviews are basic building blocks of evidence-based medicine, surveys of existing literature devoted typically to a definite question that aim to bring out scientific conclusions. They are principled in a way Wikipedians can appreciate, taking a critical view of their sources.  Ben Goldacre in 2014 wrote (link below) "[...] : the "information architecture" of evidence based medicine (if you can tolerate such a phrase) is a chaotic, ad hoc, poorly connected ecosystem of legacy projects. In some respects the whole show is still run on paper, like it's the 19th century." Is there a Wikidatan in the house? Wouldn't some machine-readable content that is structured data help? Most likely it would, but the arcana of systematic reviews and how they add value would still need formal handling. The PRISMA standard dates from 2009, with an update started in 2018. The concerns there include the corpus of papers used: how selected and filtered? Now that Wikidata has a 20.9 million item bibliography, one can at least pose questions. Each systematic review is a tagging opportunity for a bibliography. Could that tagging be reproduced by a query, in principle? Can it even be second-guessed by a query (i.e. simulated by a protocol which translates into SPARQL)? Homing in on the arcana, do the inclusion and filtering criteria translate into metadata? At some level they must, but are these metadata explicitly expressed in the articles themselves? The answer to that is surely "no" at this point, but can TDM find them? Again "no", right now. Automatic identification doesn't just happen. Actually these questions lack originality. It should be noted though that WP:MEDRS, the reliable sources guideline used here for health information, hinges on the assumption that the usefully systematic reviews of biomedical literature can be recognised. Its nutshell summary, normally the part of a guideline with the highest density of common sense, allows literature reviews in general validity, but WP:MEDASSESS qualifies that indication heavily. Process wonkery about systematic reviews definitely has merit.
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MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 10:02, 28 February 2019 (UTC)
Facto Post – Issue 22 – 28 March 2019
[edit]| Facto Post – Issue 22 – 28 March 2019
The Editor is Charles Matthews, for ContentMine. Please leave feedback for him, on his User talk page.
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Half a century ago, it was the era of the mainframe computer, with its air-conditioned room, twitching tape-drives, and appearance in the title of a spy novel Billion-Dollar Brain then made into a Hollywood film. Now we have the cloud, with server farms and the client–server model as quotidian: this text is being typed on a Chromebook. The term Applications Programming Interface or API is 50 years old, and refers to a type of software library as well as the interface to its use. While a compiler is what you need to get high-level code executed by a mainframe, an API out in the cloud somewhere offers a chance to perform operations on a remote server. For example, the multifarious bots active on Wikipedia have owners who exploit the MediaWiki API. APIs (called RESTful) that allow for the GET HTTP request are fundamental for what could colloquially be called "moving data around the Web"; from which Wikidata benefits 24/7. So the fact that the Wikidata SPARQL endpoint at query.wikidata.org has a RESTful API means that, in lay terms, Wikidata content can be GOT from it. The programming involved, besides the SPARQL language, could be in Python, younger by a few months than the Web. Magic words, such as occur in fantasy stories, are wishful (rather than RESTful) solutions to gaining access. You may need to be a linguist to enter Ali Baba's cave or the western door of Moria (French in the case of "Open Sesame", in fact, and Sindarin being the respective languages). Talking to an API requires a bigger toolkit, which first means you have to recognise the tools in terms of what they can do. On the way to the wikt:impactful or polymathic modern handling of facts, one must perhaps take only tactful notice of tech's endemic problem with documentation, and absorb the insightful point that the code in APIs does articulate the customary procedures now in place on the cloud for getting information. As Owl explained to Winnie-the-Pooh, it tells you The Thing to Do.
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MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 11:45, 28 March 2019 (UTC)
Facto Post – Issue 23 – 30 April 2019
[edit]| Facto Post – Issue 23 – 30 April 2019
The Editor is Charles Matthews, for ContentMine. Please leave feedback for him, on his User talk page.
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 Talk of cloud computing draws a veil over hardware, but also, less obviously but more importantly, obscures such intellectual distinction as matters most in its use. Wikidata begins to allow tasks to be undertaken that were out of easy reach. The facility should not be taken as the real point. Coming in from another angle, the "executive decision" is more glamorous; but the "administrative decision" should be admired for its command of facts. Think of the attitudes ad fontes, so prevalent here on Wikipedia as "can you give me a source for that?", and being prepared to deal with complicated analyses into specified subcases. Impatience expressed as a disdain for such pedantry is quite understandable, but neither dirty data nor false dichotomies are at all good to have around. Issue 13 and Issue 21, respectively on WP:MEDRS and systematic reviews, talk about biomedical literature and computing tasks that would be of higher quality if they could be made more "administrative". For example, it is desirable that the decisions involved be consistent, explicable, and reproducible by non-experts from specified inputs. What gets clouded out is not impossibly hard to understand. You do need to put together the insights of functional programming, which is a doctrinaire and purist but clearcut approach, with the practicality of office software. Loopless computation can be conceived of as a seamless forward march of spreadsheet columns, each determined by the content of previous ones. Very well: to do a backward audit, when now we are talking about Wikidata, we rely on integrity of data and its scrupulous sourcing: and clearcut case analyses. The MEDRS example forces attention on purge attempts such as Beall's list.
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MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 11:27, 30 April 2019 (UTC)
Facto Post – Issue 24 – 17 May 2019
[edit]Facto Post – Issue 24 – 17 May 2019 The Editor is Charles Matthews, for ContentMine. Please leave feedback for him, on his User talk page.
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Two dozen issues, and this may be the last, a valediction at least for a while. It's time for a two-year summation of ContentMine projects involving TDM (text and data mining). Wikidata and now Structured Data on Commons represent the overlap of Wikimedia with the Semantic Web. This common ground is helping to convert an engineering concept into a movement. TDM generally has little enough connection with the Semantic Web, being instead in the orbit of machine learning which is no respecter of the semantic. Don't break a taboo by asking bots "and what do you mean by that?" The ScienceSource project innovates in TDM, by storing its text mining results in a Wikibase site. It strives for compliance of its fact mining, on drug treatments of diseases, with an automated form of the relevant Wikipedia referencing guideline MEDRS. Where WikiFactMine set up an API for reuse of its results, ScienceSource has a SPARQL query service, with look-and-feel exactly that of Wikidata's at query.wikidata.org. It also now has a custom front end, and its content can be federated, in other words used in data mashups: it is one of over 50 sites that can federate with Wikidata. The human factor comes to bear through the front end, which combines a link to the HTML version of a paper, text mining results organised in drug and disease columns, and a SPARQL display of nearby drug and disease terms. Much software to develop and explain, so little time! Rather than telling the tale, Facto Post brings you ScienceSource links, starting from the how-to video, lower right.
The review tool requires a log in on sciencesource.wmflabs.org, and an OAuth permission (bottom of a review page) to operate. It can be used in simple and more advanced workflows. Examples of queries for the latter are at d:Wikidata_talk:ScienceSource project/Queries#SS_disease_list and d:Wikidata_talk:ScienceSource_project/Queries#NDF-RT issue. Please be aware that this is a research project in development, and may have outages for planned maintenance. That will apply for the next few days, at least. The ScienceSource wiki main page carries information on practical matters. Email is not enabled on the wiki: use site mail here to Charles Matthews in case of difficulty, or if you need support. Further explanatory videos will be put into commons:Category:ContentMine videos. If you wish to receive no further issues of Facto Post, please remove your name from our mailing list. Alternatively, to opt out of all massmessage mailings, you may add Category:Wikipedians who opt out of message delivery to your user talk page.
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MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 18:52, 17 May 2019 (UTC)
Notice of Conflict of interest noticeboard discussion
[edit]
There is currently a discussion at Wikipedia:Conflict of interest/Noticeboard regarding a possible conflict of interest incident with which you may be involved. Thank you. SmartSE (talk) 19:33, 18 November 2021 (UTC)
Wikimedia Foundation Bulletin July Issue 2
[edit]
Upcoming and current events and conversations
Talking: 2024 continues
- Where to from here? A message from Wikimedia Foundation CEO, Maryana Iskander.
- The program for Wikimania Katowice (7–10 August 2024) is now live! Register now to attend virtually!
- Are you speaking at Wikimania? Here are some resources for speakers.
Annual Goals Progress on Infrastructure
See also newsletters: Wikimedia Apps · Growth · Research · Web · Wikifunctions & Abstract Wikipedia · Tech News · Language and Internationalization · other newsletters on Mediawiki.org
- The Foundation recently opened our first data center in South America. Read about how it is already lowering load times.
- Feature updates from the Tech News: Stewards can now globally block accounts; Wikimedia site users can now submit account vanishing requests via GlobalVanishRequest; and interface of FlaggedRevs (also known as “Pending Changes”) is improved.
- Dark mode will transform Wikipedia's accessibility. Interface admins and user script maintainers are encouraged to check gadgets and user scripts in the dark mode, to find any hard-coded colors and fix them.
- Measure the impact of Wikimedia Commons with Commons Impact Metrics analytics dashboard, now available via data dumps and API.
- Key findings from user research about confusion in uploading images to Wikipedia.
- This month’s Wikimedia Research Showcase highlighted the impact machine translation has on both content and readers of Wikipedia and provided interesting insights on how to overcome related challenges. Watch the recording.
- The Charts project officially kicked off. The goal of this new initiative is to restore basic data visualization capabilities to the wikis. Check out the project page and follow our progress on Phabricator.
- The CampaignEvents extension is now available on Meta-wiki, Arabic Wikipedia, Igbo Wikipedia, and Swahili Wikipedia, and can be requested on other wikis. This extension helps manage and make events more visible. Learn about how to request this extension.
- The Campaigns Product & Programs teams have launched a consultation on WikiProjects and other forms of collaboration on the wikis. They want to understand why they work (or don’t work) for some Wikimedia communities, and they want to learn what can be done to improve the experience. Everyone is encouraged to share their feedback.
- Are you a technical contributor? Check out the latest Technical Community Newsletter.
Annual Goals Progress on Equity
See also a list of all movement events: on Meta
- The Wikimania Core Organizing Team (COT) for 2025 is delighted to announce that the 20th Wikimania will be hosted in Nairobi, Kenya.
- The Wikipedia Library secured new partnerships with Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), Central European University Press, and l’Informé and is adding more content collections in the library.
- Three new A Wiki Minute videos have been released which address reader privacy and content management on Wikipedia, as well as how Wikipedia differs from social media platforms. Learn how A Wiki Minute videos have helped increase awareness about our work.
- The Committee Support Team year-in-review and reflections.
- A new 20-minute audio interview about the WikiLearn platform with Asaf Bartov, in an episode of the WikipediaPodden podcast.
- More of the Wikipedia core policies curriculum developed for the Africa Growth Pilot is available for review. After edits and improvements by the community, recorded videos would become a permanent core policies course on WikiLearn.
- One new wiki has been created: Wikivoyage in Czech.
Annual Goals Progress on Safety & Integrity
See also blogs: Global Advocacy blog · Global Advocacy Newsletter · Policy blog
- Voting period for the Universal Code of Conduct Coordinating Committee (U4C) is open now until August 10. Learn more about voting and voter eligibility.
- US Supreme Court ruling on NetChoice cases: What does it mean for Wikipedia?
Annual Goals Progress on Effectiveness
See also: quarterly Metrics Reports
- Announcing the 2023-2024 Research Fund Grantees and their funded projects.
Board and Board committee updates
See Wikimedia Foundation Board noticeboard · Affiliations Committee Newsletter
- The outcomes of the June Board meeting are published on Meta. Agenda for the August meeting is here.
- Welcoming new affiliates: Recognition of Wikimedistas Wayuu User Group, Wikimedia Community of Togo User Group, and Wikimedians of Singapore User Group.
- The Board of Trustees selection pre-onboarding and campaign period is open from July 25 to August 26.
- Foundation Trustee Dariusz Jemelniak was appointed to the Governing Board of the European Institute of Innovation and Technology, established as part of the EU’s key funding program for research and innovation.
- Movement Charter voter feedback: All comments are now on Meta-wiki (65 comments from the affiliates voters and 447 comments from the individual voters).
Other Movement curated newsletters & news
See also: Diff blog · Goings-on · Wikimedia World · Signpost (en) · Kurier (de) · other newsletters:
- Topics: Education · GLAM · The Wikipedia Library
- Wikimedia Projects: Milestones · Wikidata
- Regions: Central and Eastern Europe
Previous editions of this bulletin are on Meta. Let askcac
wikimedia.org know if you have any feedback or suggestions for improvement!
MediaWiki message delivery 21:48, 1 August 2024 (UTC)
Wikimedia Foundation Bulletin August Issue 1
[edit]Special Wikimania issue This is a special Wikimania issue of the Bulletin. We'll be back to our regular format in the next issue
- Catch up on missed sessions of Wikimania Katowice or revisit your favourites directly from the program, or review the day-long streams on YouTube: Day 1 streams, Day 2 streams, Day 3 streams, Day 4 streams.
- The Wikimedian of the Year Awards at Wikimania paid tribute to amazing Wikimedians who have made significant contributions to the movement. Learn about all of this year's winners.
- Daily highlights from Wikimania: Day 1, Day 2, Day 3, Day 4.
- Winners of the fifth edition of the Coolest Tool Award was announced at Wikimania.
- Highlights of product and tech sessions on Wikimania with links to description and recording.
- The Open Conversation with the Trustees at Wikimania hosted breakout discussions about the Movement Charter, affiliate strategy and hubs, the proposal for a Global Resource Distribution Committee (hybrid table--had streaming and is available to watch back online), the Product/Tech Advisory Council & Product/Tech priorities, building a sustainable revenue strategy for the movement: online fundraising, Wikimedia Enterprise and the Wikimedia Endowment, and responding to emerging threats to free knowledge: litigation, censorship, disinformation, and trust in an election year.
- Catch up on Foundation-led sessions from Wikimania on safety and information integrity: Protecting Children on-Wiki: a Child Rights Solutions Workshop, Information Integrity during Elections: Collective effort to address mis and disinformation, Policy Advocacy Showcase: Stories of policy advocacy work in the movement and future trends.
- Wikimania 2024 in Poland celebrates global volunteers who make Wikipedia and sister projects possible.
Upcoming and current events and conversations
Talking: 2024 continues
- Language Community Meeting: Have topics to share or discuss? Add agenda here. (August 30 at 15:00 UTC.
Annual Goals Progress on Infrastructure
See also newsletters: Wikimedia Apps · Growth · Research · Web · Wikifunctions & Abstract Wikipedia · Tech News · Language and Internationalization · other newsletters on Mediawiki.org
- Two new parser functions and more recent changes on Tech News.
- Help us better understand WikiProjects or similar online collaboration spaces. Fill out a brief survey or share your thoughts on the talkpage.
- Parsoid deployed on first production wikis and more updates on MediaWiki Product Insights.
- Applications to join the Product and Technology Advisory Council (PTAC) are extended until September 16.
Annual Goals Progress on Equity
See also a list of all movement events: on Meta
- The 4th edition of the Language & Internationalization newsletter (Aug 2024) is available.
- Reviving history and spreading the Spirit of Wikisource Loves Manuscripts (WILMA) in Naga City, the Philippines and Yogyakarta, Indonesia.
Annual Goals Progress on Safety & Integrity
See also blogs: Global Advocacy blog · Global Advocacy Newsletter · Policy blog
- Digital Rights and Inclusion Forum, Global Digital Compact, and Anti-Disinformation Repository: Highlights from the Global Advocacy Team.
Other Movement curated newsletters & news
See also: Diff blog · Goings-on · Wikimedia World · Signpost (en) · Kurier (de) · other newsletters:
- Topics: Education · GLAM · The Wikipedia Library
- Wikimedia Projects: Milestones · Wikidata
- Regions: Central and Eastern Europe
Previous editions of this bulletin are on Meta. Let askcacwikimedia.org know if you have any feedback or suggestions for improvement!
MediaWiki message delivery 21:32, 15 August 2024 (UTC)
Wikimedia Foundation Bulletin August Issue 2
[edit]Upcoming and current events and conversations Talking: 2024 continues
- Language Community meeting (August 30 at 15:00 UTC).
- Cross-Regional Grantee Partner Learning Conversation Part 1 (August 31 at 07:00 UTC, in English, French, and Chinese Mandarin).
- The Wikimedia+Libraries Convention 2025 will take place in Mexico City from January 15-17, 2025. The scholarship application deadline is August 31.
- ESEAP Community Call (September 8 at 07:00 UTC).
Annual Goals Progress on Infrastructure See also newsletters: Wikimedia Apps · Growth · Research · Web · Wikifunctions & Abstract Wikipedia · Tech News · Language and Internationalization · other newsletters on Mediawiki.org
- Highlights of the Product & Technology department's recent work in improving the user experience.
- Editor tools related to references & categories and more tech updates on the latest Tech News.
- Outreachy (a paid, remote three-month internship to support underrepresented groups in tech) is open. Mentors should submit projects before September 11 at 16:00 UTC (more info).
- The Campaign Events extension is now available on Meta-Wiki, Arabic Wikipedia, Igbo Wikipedia, and Swahili Wikipedia, and can be requested in other language wikis.
- The Campaigns teams would like to learn more about how your communities do online collaboration such as WikiProjects, please take this Google Form survey or share examples of successful collaborations on Meta Wiki.
- Editors using the iOS Wikipedia app who have more than 50 edits can now use the Add an Image feature. This feature presents opportunities for small but useful contributions to Wikipedia.
- Applications for the Product and Technology Advisory Council (PTAC) are still open until September 16.
Annual Goals Progress on Equity See also a list of all movement events: on Meta
- Central Asian community members share their thoughts on Wikimania 2024.
- Take a look at updates on new feature developments and improvements in various language-related technical projects in the July 2024 edition of the Language and internationalization newsletter.
- The Conference and Events Fund is open for submission until September 2.
Annual Goals Progress on Safety & Integrity See also blogs: Global Advocacy blog · Global Advocacy Newsletter · Policy blog
- Meet the Wikimedia Foundation Global Advocacy Team.
Board and Board committee updates See Wikimedia Foundation Board noticeboard · Affiliations Committee Newsletter
- Some next steps on a movement charter: A message from Wikimedia Foundation CEO, Maryana Iskander, Chair of Board of Trustees, Nataliia Tymkiv, and Chair of Governance Committee, Dariusz Jemielniak.
- Elections for four community-and-affiliate elected seats on the Board of Trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation will be held from September 3 to September 17. To learn more about the candidates, watch this short "Meet the Candidates" presentations.
Other Movement curated newsletters & news See also: Diff blog · Goings-on · Wikimedia World · Signpost (en) · Kurier (de) · other newsletters:
- Topics: Education · GLAM · The Wikipedia Library
- Wikimedia Projects: Milestones · Wikidata
- Regions: Central and Eastern Europe
Previous editions of this bulletin are on Meta. Let askcacwikimedia.org know if you have any feedback or suggestions for improvement!
MediaWiki message delivery 21:06, 29 August 2024 (UTC)
Wikimedia Foundation Bulletin September Issue 1
[edit]Upcoming and current events and conversations Talking: 2024 continues
- The Voting period for the 2024 Board of Trustees election is open until September 17. Go to the SecurePoll voting page to vote.
- Scholarship application for Wikisource Conference 2025 in Bali, Indonesia is open until September 20.
- WikiConference Nigeria 2024 will be held in Abuja, Nigeria from September 12–14.
- Wikimedia CEE Meeting 2024 will take place in Istanbul, Türkiye on September 20–22.
- Celtic Knot Wikimedia Languages Conference will take place in Waterford City, Ireland on September 25–27.
- Italian WikiConference will be held in Padua, Italy on September 27–29.
- Join Wiki Loves Onam, a photo campaign dedicated to documenting the vibrant and colorful festival of Onam on Wikimedia Commons. The campaign runs until September 30.
Annual Goals Progress on Infrastructure
See also newsletters: Wikimedia Apps · Growth · Research · Web · Wikifunctions & Abstract Wikipedia · Tech News · Language and Internationalization · other newsletters on Mediawiki.org
- Users of all Wikis will have access to Wikimedia sites as read-only for a few minutes on September 25, starting at 15:00 UTC. This is a planned datacenter switchover for maintenance purposes.
- The Alternative Text suggested edits feature has now been fully deployed to production on the iOS App for Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, and French Wikipedias! This feature, part of WE1.2, is designed to enhance how newcomers add alt text to images, aiming to improve accessibility and engagement. For more details, visit the project page and explore the new feature in the app!
- Editors and volunteer developers interested in data visualization can now test the new software for charts. Its early version is available on beta Commons and beta Wikipedia. This is an important milestone before making charts available on regular wikis. You can read more about this project update and help test the charts.
- A new draft text of a policy discussing the use of Wikimedia’s APIs has been published on Meta-Wiki. The draft text does not reflect a change in policy around the APIs; instead, it is an attempt to codify existing API rules. Comments, questions, and suggestions are welcome on the proposed update’s talk page until September 13 or until those discussions have concluded.
- More recent tech updates from Tech News.
- The latest status updates from Wikifunctions.
- Help us find WikiProjects or other online collaboration spaces!
Annual Goals Progress on Equity
See also a list of all movement events: on Meta
- Revamping Movement Strategy Grants with Hub Focus.
- Watch the recordings of Let's Connect Grantee Partner Learning Conversation: Conversation #1 with Wiki in Africa, Wiki Advocates Philippines, and Indic MediaWiki Developers UG and Conversation #2 with Wikimedia Community UG Malta, Wikimedia MA UG, and Wikimedia Canada.
Annual Goals Progress on Safety & Integrity
See also blogs: Global Advocacy blog · Global Advocacy Newsletter · Policy blog
- Wikimedia Foundation defeats gambling magnate’s lawsuit in Germany.
- Wikimedia Indonesia and UNESCO Jakarta Team Up Against Harmful Content Online.
- Child Rights Impact Assessment at EduWiki Knowledge Showcase and more: Latest updates from the Global Advocacy team.
- Protecting the people: Some recommendations for safety while contributing to Wikimedia projects.
Board and Board committee updates
See Wikimedia Foundation Board noticeboard · Affiliations Committee Newsletter
- The Movement Charter Drafting Committee published their recommendations and bid farewell.
- Read updates from the July 2024 Wikimedia Endowment Board Meeting.
- Learn more about 12 candidates running for 4 seats on the Board by reading their statements and their answers to community questions.
- See the new members of the U4C following the results of the Universal Code of Conduct Coordinating Committee (U4C) special election, a new decision making group that will enforce the UCoC in specific circumstances.
Other Movement curated newsletters & news
See also: Diff blog · Goings-on · Wikimedia World · Signpost (en) · Kurier (de) · other newsletters:
- Topics: Education · GLAM · The Wikipedia Library
- Wikimedia Projects: Milestones · Wikidata
- Regions: Central and Eastern Europe
Previous editions of this bulletin are on Meta. Let askcacwikimedia.org know if you have any feedback or suggestions for improvement!
MediaWiki message delivery 21:40, 12 September 2024 (UTC)
Wikimedia Foundation Bulletin September Issue 2
[edit]Upcoming and current events and conversations
Talking: 2024 continues
- "Wikimania Katowice coverage travels around the world" – a curated list of community and media coverage of Wikimania 2024. Over 100 pieces so far have been published about the event.
- WikiForHumanRights will lead a conversation about the future of the campaign with the Africa region on September 25 at 15:00 UTC.
- Let’s Connect: “Technology for Language Diversity in Wikimedia” will take place on September 26 at 15:00 UTC.
- Wikisource Conference 2025, the deadline for scholarship applications has been extended to September 29.
- Big Fat Brussels Meeting 9 will be held in Brussels, Belgium from September 29–30.
- WikiConference North America will be held in Indianapolis, USA from October 3–6.
- WikiIndaba Conference 2024 will be held in Johannesburg, South Africa from October 4–6.
- Wikimedia Technology Summit (WTS 2024): will be held in Hyderabad, India from October 4–5.
- ESEAP Community Call will be held on October 6 at 07:00 UTC.
- Wikimedia+Libraries International Convention 2025 is accepting submissions until October 6.
- The Language and Product Localisation team is hosting two office hours to discuss this year's plans and gather feedback from event organizers. The first session is October 5 at 16:00 UTC (Europe-Africa-Americas friendly), and the second is on October 6 at 03:00 UTC (Asia-Pacific friendly).
Annual Goals Progress on Infrastructure See also newsletters: Wikimedia Apps · Growth · Research · Web · Wikifunctions & Abstract Wikipedia · Tech News · Language and Internationalization · other newsletters on Mediawiki.org
- MediaWiki Product Insights: The latest edition includes details about: research about hook handlers to help simplify development, research about performance improvements, work to improve the REST API for end-users, and more.
- Tech News: Find out about the new automated Special:NamespaceInfo page, the latest Wishlist focus area, Template recall and discovery, and more recent tech updates.
- Wikidata Query Service: A new change to Wikidata Query Service will impact certain uses. The project will enter a transition period until the end of February 2025. For more details, visit the announcement page.
- Wikimedia Enterprise: Enhanced Free API Accounts: Recurring Credits and More Frequent Updates, early beta release of Structured Contents in Snapshot API, and early beta dataset release to Hugging Face.
- Wikifunctions: Status updates from September 20.
- Wikipedia Mobile Apps: Over 20,000 images have been added via the "Add an Image" feature on both iOS and Android (T372954)!
- Knowledge is Human: Read about ongoing work on the 2024 iteration of the "Knowledge is Human" public awareness campaign
- Server Switch: A server switch was completed successfully on September 25 with a read-only time of only 2 minutes 45 seconds.
Annual Goals Progress on Equity
See also a list of all movement events: on Meta
- Wikimedia Research Showcase: Watch the latest showcase with the theme of Curation of Wikimedia AI Datasets.
- Conference and Event Fund: Updates and changes to the Conference and Event Fund program beginning in September 2024.
Annual Goals Progress on Safety & Integrity
See also blogs: Global Advocacy blog · Global Advocacy Newsletter · Policy blog
- UN Summit of the Future Action Days: Watch the Wikimedia event titled "The Power of the Commons: Digital Public Goods for a more secure, inclusive, and resilient world" at The Summit of the Future. This is expected to result in a negotiated Global Digital Compact, which represents the final phase of our movement-wide campaign to impact the text of the Global Digital Compact.
- Wikipedia and the Digital Services Act: Lessons on the strength of community and the future of internet regulation.
Foundation statements
Other Movement curated newsletters & news
See also: Diff blog · Goings-on · Wikimedia World · Signpost (en) · Kurier (de) · other newsletters:
- Topics: Education · GLAM · The Wikipedia Library
- Wikimedia Projects: Milestones · Wikidata
- Regions: Central and Eastern Europe
Previous editions of this bulletin are on Meta. Let askcacwikimedia.org know if you have any feedback or suggestions for improvement!
MediaWiki message delivery 17:10, 27 September 2024 (UTC)
Wikimedia Foundation Bulletin October Issue 1
[edit]Upcoming and current events and conversations
Talking: 2024 continues
- WikiArabia Conference 2024 will be held in Muscat, Oman, from October 25 to 27.
- WikiConvention francophone 2024 will be held in Québec, Canada, from November 2 to 3.
- AffCom, Case Review Committee (CRC) and the Ombuds commission (OC) are seeking new member applications from October 14.
Annual Goals Progress on Infrastructure
See also newsletters: Wikimedia Apps · Growth · Research · Web · Wikifunctions & Abstract Wikipedia · Tech News · Language and Internationalization · other newsletters on Mediawiki.org
- Tech News: Updates on Dark Mode, Vector 2022 skin, CampaignEvents extension, and more on tech news.
- Translation suggestion: Sign up to participate in the test project, Translation suggestions: Topic-based & Community-defined lists, which will help organisers identify and add relevant content based on high-impact topics to their Wikipedia.
- Wikifunctions: Status updates from September 26.
- Wikipedia Apps: Check out the latest issue of the Apps Quarterly Newsletter!
Annual Goals Progress on Equity
See also a list of all movement events: on Meta
- WikiWomen Summit: Event summary at Wikimania 2024.
- Let's Connect: Watch recordings of the session Technology for Language Diversity in Wikimedia.
- WikiLearn: The latest online learning opportunities created by Wikimedians for Wikimedians.
- Indonesia: Training for Indonesian Wikipedia Administrators to Safeguard Knowledge Integrity Ahead of the Regional Elections
Annual Goals Progress on Safety & Integrity
See also blogs: Global Advocacy blog · Global Advocacy Newsletter · Policy blog
- Mexico: Wikimedia Foundation files amicus brief in Mexico urging continued use of intermediary liability protections for user-generated content in Richter v. Google.
- Paraguay: Wikimedia Foundation to Paraguayan Supreme Court: Do not allow people to abuse the law to suppress legitimate information
- Global: Celebrating a legal victory in Germany against censorship, reflections on Open Culture strategic workshop, and more global advocacy updates.
Board and Board committee updates
See Wikimedia Foundation Board noticeboard · Affiliations Committee Newsletter
- Board Governance: Update from Wikimedia Foundation Board Governance Committee, a proposal to ask for help and co-creation in Movement Charter Mapping Exercise.
Other Movement curated newsletters & news
See also: Diff blog · Goings-on · Wikimedia World · Signpost (en) · Kurier (de) · Actualités du Wiktionnaire (fr) · Regards sur l’actualité de la Wikimedia (fr) · Wikimag (fr) · other newsletters:
- Topics: Education · GLAM · The Wikipedia Library
- Wikimedia Projects: Milestones · Wikidata
- Regions: Central and Eastern Europe
Previous editions of this bulletin are on Meta. Let askcac
wikimedia.org know if you have any feedback or suggestions for improvement!
MediaWiki message delivery 23:30, 10 October 2024 (UTC)
Wikimedia Foundation Bulletin October Issue 2
[edit]Upcoming and current events and conversations
Talking: 2024 continues
- How Wikipedia is staying relevant in the AI era: Wikimedia Foundation CEO Maryana Iskander talks about Wikipedia and AI in an interview with the ‘Rapid Response’ podcast.
- Wiki for Human Rights is organizing a call for South Asia, East, Southeast Asia and the Pacific communities to discuss the Future of WikiForHumanRights on October 24 at 10 UTC.
- Campaign Events tool: a call with the Indonesian communities will be hosted on October 25.
- Translation suggestions: Topic-based & Community-defined lists project: an office hour with event/campaign organisers and contributors who use Content Translation tool will be hosted on October 26th. Visit this page for more details.
Annual Goals Progress on Infrastructure
See also newsletters: Wikimedia Apps · Growth · Research · Web · Wikifunctions & Abstract Wikipedia · Tech News · Language and Internationalization · other newsletters on MediaWiki.org
- Tech News: In issue 2024/42, read about the removal of the Structured Discussion extension (also known as Flow), work on making text searches easier, and more. In issue 2024/43, read about improvements to mobile app navigation, temporary accounts pilot details, the Content Discovery Experiments, and more updates.
- MediaWiki: The latest monthly MediaWiki Product Insights newsletter is available and include updates on Wikimedia’s authentication system, research to simplify feature development in the MediaWiki platform, and more.
- CampaignEvents extension: The CampaignEvents extension provides tools to create, manage, and promote collaborative activities on the wikis, such as edit-a-thons, meetups, and more. You can visit the Deployment page to learn how to get the extension on your wiki.
- Research: The Research team and collaborators are launching new research on editors with extended rights.
- New Content Translation feature: Translators using Content Translation on wikis with mobile support can now customize their article suggestions with 41 filtering options. This feature helps translators find relevant articles based on their interests for translation.
- Wikifunctions: We are collecting feedback on the "About" widget that shows more info about the functions. Also, status updates from October 11 and October 17.
- Temporary Accounts: Temporary accounts will begin rolling out on October 29 to production wikis with an aim to do a complete deployment by May 2025. You can see the deployment plan and timeline on the project page. As we rollout this change, it is likely that some tools (gadgets, user scripts, templates and bots) will be impacted by it. We have a developer FAQ to help developers with making necessary changes to their maintained tool(s). Please let us know on our talk page if you have any tool in mind that may need updating or if you need help with updating your maintained tools.
- Knowledge is Human campaign: The Communications department has just launched a public awareness campaign (landing page) to showcase how real articles are edited and highlight Wikipedia as a source of information ahead of the 2024 “Big English” fundraising drive.
Annual Goals Progress on Equity
See also a list of all movement events: on Meta-Wiki
- Grants: Announcing the newest round of Knowledge Equity Fund grantees.
- Wikimedia Research Showcase: Watch the latest showcase with the theme of Wikipedia for Political and Election Analysis.
Annual Goals Progress on Safety & Integrity
See also blogs: Global Advocacy blog · Global Advocacy Newsletter · Policy blog
- Latest transparency report: The latest Transparency Report, covering the period from January to June 2024, is now live on the Foundation website. View also highlights from the report.
Board and Board committee updates
See Wikimedia Foundation Board noticeboard · Affiliations Committee Newsletter
- Board Elections: Preliminary results of the 2024 Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees elections has been announced.
- Affiliates Strategy: Implementation status of a new affiliate health criteria and changes to User Groups recognition process.
Other Movement curated newsletters & news
See also: Diff blog · Goings-on · Planet Wikimedia · Signpost (en) · Kurier (de) · Actualités du Wiktionnaire (fr) · Regards sur l’actualité de la Wikimedia (fr) · Wikimag (fr) · other newsletters:
- Topics: Education · GLAM · The Wikipedia Library
- Wikimedia Projects: Milestones · Wikidata
- Regions: Central and Eastern Europe
Subscribe or unsubscribe · Help translate
For information about the Bulletin and to read previous editions, see the project page on Meta-Wiki. Let askcacwikimedia.org know if you have any feedback or suggestions for improvement!
MediaWiki message delivery 23:52, 24 October 2024 (UTC)
Wikimedia Foundation Bulletin November Issue 1
[edit]
Upcoming and current events and conversations
Talking: 2024 continues
- Commons Community Call: The first community call with Wikimedia Commons volunteers and stakeholders to help prioritize support efforts for 2025-2026 Fiscal Year will take place on November 21. The theme of this call will be about how content should be organised on Wikimedia Commons. The call will be hosted by Chief Product and Technology Officer Selena Deckelmann.
- Conferencia Justicia climática Perú 2024: Conference on climate justice, indigenous voices and Wikimedia platform will be held in Huaraz, Peru from November 8 to 10.
- Affiliations Committee: Applications for joining the Affiliations Committee is open until November 18.
- Ombuds Commission and Case Review Committee: Applications for joining the Ombuds commission and the Case Review Committee are open until December 2.
- Language community meeting: A language community meeting will be hosted on November 29, 16:00 UTC, discussing technical updates and problem-solving.
Annual Goals Progress on Infrastructure
See also newsletters: Wikimedia Apps · Growth · Research · Web · Wikifunctions & Abstract Wikipedia · Tech News · Language and Internationalization · other newsletters on MediaWiki.org
- Advisory Council: The new Product and Technology Advisory Council (PTAC) was announced. The PTAC will try to publish a set of community-validated recommendations that can serve as a potential 2-3 year blueprint for product and technical success.
- Wikifunctions: The Abstract Wikipedia team is working toward a rewrite of our backend services in a different programming language, likely Rust. More status updates.
- Tech News: The Guided Tour extension, which help newcomers understand how to edit, now works with dark mode; Wikipedia readers can now download a browser extension to experiment with potential features that making it easier for readers to discover information on the wikis. More tech updates from tech news 44 and 43.
- Temporary accounts: Logged-out editors on 12 wikis, including Norwegian, Romanian, Serbian, Danish, and Cantonese Wikipedia, receive temporary accounts now. This new account type enhances the privacy of logged-out editors and makes it easier for community members to communicate with them. Read the new Diff post to learn more about temporary accounts.
- Mobile apps: The Mobile Apps team has released an update to the iOS app’s navigation, now available in the latest App store version.
- Campaign Events Extension: The Campaign Events extension is now live on two more wikis, Wikidata and the Spanish Wikipedia.
- Admin Retention: A survey on Wikipedia Administrator Recruitment, Retention, and Attrition is open until November 11. As part of the Foundation's 2024-2025 Annual Plan, the research team and collaborators are studying recruitment, retention, and attrition patterns among long-tenured community members in official moderation and administration roles.
- Knowledge is Human: The campaign web page, which educates visitors on Wikipedia’s model and why it’s trustworthy, has earned over 140,000 clicks. The campaign has increased pageviews on WikimediaFoundation.org by more than 50%.
Annual Goals Progress on Equity
See also a list of all movement events: on Meta-Wiki
- WikiCelebrate: From making a minor maintenance edit in 2005 to being one of the most appreciated Wikimedians in the Central Eastern European (CEE) region: this month we celebrate Mārtiņš Bruņenieks.
- Wiki Loves Earth: Mountains, Birds and Lakes – Central Asia Edition
- Future of Language Incubation: As part of a new Future of Language Incubation initiative to support language onboarding, Wikipedia is now live for five languages: Pannonian Rusyn, Tai Nüa, Iban, Obolo, and Southern Ndebele.
Annual Goals Progress on Safety & Integrity
See also blogs: Global Advocacy blog · Global Advocacy Newsletter · Policy blog
- Global Advocacy: Reflecting on the anniversary of the EU’s Digital Service Act (DSA), Wikimedians share successes and public policy priorities at digital rights Global Gathering event, and more global advocacy updates.
Annual Goals Progress on Effectiveness
See also: quarterly Metrics Reports
- English Fundraising: The Road to Launch: Wikimedia’s 2024 English Fundraising Campaign.
- Fundraising Report: Our annual fundraising report for the 2023-2024 fiscal year is published. Last year, we had over 8 million donors giving an average donation of m:Fundraising/2023-24 Report0.58. We ran campaigns in 33 countries, 18 languages, and received donations from over 200 countries.
Other Movement curated newsletters & news
See also: Diff blog · Goings-on · Planet Wikimedia · Signpost (en) · Kurier (de) · Actualités du Wiktionnaire (fr) · Regards sur l’actualité de la Wikimedia (fr) · Wikimag (fr) · other newsletters:
- Topics: Education · GLAM · The Wikipedia Library
- Wikimedia Projects: Milestones · Wikidata
- Regions: Central and Eastern Europe
Subscribe or unsubscribe · Help translate
Previous editions of this bulletin are on Meta-Wiki. Let askcacwikimedia.org know if you have any feedback or suggestions for improvement!