This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page.
Ongoing: On 24 May, there was a significant outage affecting Wikidata and sister projects that use Wikidata. As a result, some features of are temporarily disabled: Wikidata's property suggester, Lua modules and parser functions calling by label instead of ID, search for the ArticlePlaceholder. We apologize for the inconvenience, we're working to get them back as soon as possible. For technical details, see: phab:T195520 & Incident documentation/20180524-wikidata.
Made constraint check result appear directly after adding a new statement (phab:T194247)
Working on looking up entities by external identifiers on Special:Search (phab:T99899)
Added Docker image to Wikibase website (phab:T189936)
Added WikibaseImport script to Docker images to make it easier for people to start their own Wikibase install with some data imported from Wikidata (phab:T192080)
You may prevent the proposed deletion by removing the ((proposed deletion/dated)) notice, but please explain why in your edit summary or on the article's talk page.
You can now use global preferences on most wikis. This means you can set preferences for all wikis at the same time. Before this you had to change them on each individual wiki.
Country geoshape data have been added to Commons and linked to the corresponding Wikidata items. These geoshapes can be used to visualise query results e.g. World map showing population of each country.
Learning to Generate Wikipedia Summaries for Underserved Languages from Wikidata, presented at the Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics by Lucie Kaffee and Hady Elsahar (see the poster and the paper)
Developing a prototype for usability testing for how the term box (labels, descriptions, aliases) could work on mobile
Investigating how we can do the display of items (their label and sometimes description when linked to in a statement or in listings like Recent Changes) in a way that is less of an issue for the database
Working on including the dispatch lag in the maxlag API to make it easier for bots to see when they should stop editing because of performance reasons (phabricator:T194950)
Working on adding a Lua function to check if an item is a subclass/instance of another one (phabricator:T179155)
Created an API that returns constraint violations for an item in TTL format in preparation for making constraint violations queryable in the query service (phabricator:T194762)
Started planning for support for Senses
Added more helpful text on Special:NewLexeme to make it easier to understand what information is required (phabricator:T193602)
Working on pre-filling the spelling variant for a new Form's representation (phabricator:T195708)
Your recent editing history at GNU Privacy Guard shows that you are currently engaged in an edit war. To resolve the content dispute, please do not revert or change the edits of others when you are reverted. Instead of reverting, please use the talk page to work toward making a version that represents consensus among editors. The best practice at this stage is to discuss, not edit-war. See BRD for how this is done. If discussions reach an impasse, you can then post a request for help at a relevant noticeboard or seek dispute resolution. In some cases, you may wish to request temporary page protection.
Being involved in an edit war can result in your being blocked from editing—especially if you violate the three-revert rule, which states that an editor must not perform more than three reverts on a single page within a 24-hour period. Undoing another editor's work—whether in whole or in part, whether involving the same or different material each time—counts as a revert. Also keep in mind that while violating the three-revert rule often leads to a block, you can still be blocked for edit warring—even if you don't violate the three-revert rule—should your behavior indicate that you intend to continue reverting repeatedly. Bbb23 (talk) 11:39, 14 June 2018 (UTC)
@Bbb23: I'm not sure that reverting spam counts as edit-warring. Plus, I did contact the user(s) whose edits I was reverting, numerous times, in an effort to get them to stop. (They did not reply.) And I did request and receive page protection; but the editor just registered an account and continued to make the same edits. That is one of the reasons I filed an SPI, so that they could be shown to be IPSOCKing, because otherwise the IP edits would have to be considered as coming from separate users, and hence would not be considered to break 3RR. But you declined the SPI. Had I not reverted Er22chi's edits, prompting them to revert my reversions, you might not have been in a position to report them at the edit-warring noticeboard. Fortunately, another editor has now (finally) blocked Er22chi, albeit only for 48 hours.
Anyhow, if you have a concrete suggestion about how I could have handled this better, and without being slapped with the template above, I would welcome it. If not, then please could you withdraw that template? Thanks, Zazpot (talk) 14:17, 15 June 2018 (UTC)
I'm sympathetic, but the kind of edits you were reverting are not exempt from edit-warring in my view. I would have stopped at two reverts and dealt with the user in some other fashion. I gave you the warning because I wanted you to stop. I gave them the warning as well, they didn't stop, they got blocked. I would have blocked them myself, but because I had also reverted, I was WP:INVOLVED and couldn't. If after the block expires, the user reinstates the material, I would immediately report them to WP:AN3 - it's not necessary to wait until they breach 3RR again.--Bbb23 (talk) 14:29, 15 June 2018 (UTC)
@Bbb23: thanks for your reply. You say, "I would have stopped at two reverts and dealt with the user in some other fashion." What would that other fashion be? This is a serious question. I want to keep fighting vandalism and spam on Wikipedia, but being accused of edit-warring for doing so leaves me feeling that this is a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" situation. Zazpot (talk) 15:59, 15 June 2018 (UTC)
There are many instances where resolving a problem like this one is not easy. All experienced editors have dealt with it. It may be frustrating, but you simply can't edit-war regardless. In this case, you should try to work it out directly with the editor. If they don't respond or it fails, take them to ANI, partly for the spam and partly for the lack of cooperation by the other editor.--Bbb23 (talk) 18:39, 15 June 2018 (UTC)
@Bbb23: as I already stated, I did not "edit war regardless"; IMO, I did not edit-war at all, merely reverted obvious spam. As I also already stated, I did "try to work it out directly with the editor". So, neither of those two pieces of advice help me to learn, nor do they answer the question that I asked you.
You say that I could have taken the issue to ANI... Well, OK, maybe next time I encounter something like this I will do that, as you say, after two reverts. But I suspect that I might not be taken seriously on so little evidence. SPI seemed like a better first port of call, because the IP socking looked obvious and a checkuser could have confirmed it: this would have given me solid evidence to bring to ANI afterwards if necessary. But as I say, you dismissed my SPI request.
In a nutshell, I do feel you rather shot the messenger here, by slapping me with that template. For the reasons I gave above, the template seems inappropriate here, and moreover it feels deeply unappreciative given the effort I put into addressing that spammer. I would remain grateful if you would withdraw it. Zazpot (talk) 20:55, 17 June 2018 (UTC)
Wikipedia editor Nick Moyes just reviewed your page, and wrote this note for you:
Please fix the references. Bare urls aren't desirable in new articles as they are prone to link rot. As this is a very new term, I'm sure you'd agree this is worthy of addressing. Expand it a bit more and it could make a good WP:DYK.
To reply, leave a comment on Nick Moyes's talk page.
@Zazpot: Well, I regard that rationale simply as lazy, sloppy and somewhat arrogant on your part. You clearly expect others to trot along behind you, tidying up after you because you can't be bothered to do it yourself. No, I'm sorry, despite the fact that some other user may well sort out the weaknesses in your edits, that's a poor attitude in my book from an experienced editor, and I hope you will see sense and have more pride in the pages you create in future. Thanks, Nick Moyes (talk) 22:10, 17 June 2018 (UTC)
@Nick Moyes:here is an earlier formulation of my rationale. Perhaps you will find it more satisfying. It, too, is a reasoned argument. Casting aspersions ("lazy", "sloppy", "somewhat arrogant") is not, and in my book is much more worthy of being called "a poor attitude ... from an experienced editor". If you still disagree, then let's just leave it here. Regards, Zazpot (talk) 22:54, 17 June 2018 (UTC)
@Zazpot: Thank you. I think we'll just leave it there. Regards, Nick Moyes (talk) 23:07, 17 June 2018 (UTC)
Wikidata weekly summary #317
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
There will be an IRC Office Hour for Structured Data on Commons on Tuesday, 26 June from 18:00-19:00 UTC. More information, including time and date conversion, is available on Meta. There is no set topic, you are welcome to bring any discussion that you would like to the office hour.
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.
Celtic Knot Conference, dedicated to Wikimedia projects and minority languages, July 5-6, in Aberystwyth (Wales). A lot of Wikidata workshops will take place during this event.
The Commons template Wikidata infobox has now passed 1.3 million uses on Commons categories, with plenty more still to come. A new help page gives advice on how to add, extend or improve uses of it, and how to fix data problems.
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".
Links
ScienceSource focus list (shortcut WD:SSFL on Wikidata), project to tag a first-pass open access medical bibliography on Wikidata, and also overcome the systematic biases in the medical literature by curation.