User talk:CFCF/Archive 31

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Facto Post – Issue 17 – 29 October 2018

Facto Post – Issue 17 – 29 October 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.

Wikidata imaged

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.

Gran Teatro, Cáceres, Spain, at night

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.

Birthday logo
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MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 15:01, 29 October 2018 (UTC)

Dyslexia

Hi this is to inform you that Dyslexia which you edited will be submitted for WikiJournal of Medicine...The objective of this message is to invite the contributors to collaboratively submit the article for review through Wiki.J.Med, and if possible, to help in further betterment of the article in accordance to the suggestions of the reviewers. Wikipedia articles are collaboratively authored. So, it is very important to make the authors aware of such a process that the article is currently undergoing[1] thanks--Ozzie10aaaa (talk) 17:11, 3 November 2018 (UTC)

This Month in GLAM: October 2018





Headlines
  • Belgium report: Erbstuecke edit-a-thon; Women in Tech edit-a-thon; Wiki Club Brussels; Wikidata workshop + party
  • Brazil report: "There is no reason not to participate in a GLAM-Wiki initiative": an interview with the director of the Museum of Veterinary Anatomy
  • Estonia report: Estonian art and geoscience collections finding their way to Commons
  • Finland report: (RE)Photographic autumn
  • France report: GLAMWiki 2018 Tel Aviv; City of Grenoble
  • Germany report: GLAMorous Conferences
  • Netherlands report: ‘More Gelders Heritage available via Wikimedia’ by Erfgoed Gelderland; Writing week Friesland; Wiki Techstorm
  • Norway report: Wiki Loves Monuments and wikinobel
  • Poland report: Heirlooms - locally and internationally
  • Serbia report: The growing GLAM
  • Sweden report: Roundtripping Project, Books Import and Wikidata Imported to SOCH
  • Switzerland report: Built heritage conservation on Commons; les sans pagEs at a Modern art museum
  • UK report: Wikidata in Oxford
  • USA report: Wikiconference North America Culture Crawl
  • WMF GLAM report: Documentation survey, Structured Data on Commons consultations, blog posts and conferences
  • Calendar: November's GLAM events
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About This Month in GLAM · Subscribe/Unsubscribe · Global message delivery · Romaine 08:15, 9 November 2018 (UTC)

Healthism

Dear CFCF, I noticed you made major revisions in the voice on Healthism I recently revised and, then, you blocked my account. It is very sad to see the number of mistakes you reintroduced in the text - for example, Crawford is not an economist but a sociologist and Nikolas Rose has nothing to do with Skrabaneck and it has written nothing on the concept of healthism - not by chance, in the citation the page number is missing. Maybe, the main misunderstanding is that this concept is not a medical concept but rather a sociological concept and it would be understood as such. As a professional social scientist, I am bewildered by the poor argument you draw on to revise the text and I would ask at least some explanation. Mauroturrini (talk) 16:32, 9 November 2018 (UTC)

Change coming to how certain templates will appear on the mobile web

Hello,

I wanted to share a follow-up to an RfC you participated in from late 2016/early 2017. It was regarding making certain warning templates visible on mobile. The Readers web team has been working to improve how these templates appear on the mobile website. I shared an announcement with communities today that covers what is happening. If you have any interest, I encourage your support in giving feedback on the project page or helping update templates of this nature with some of our recommendations.

Thank you, CKoerner (WMF) (talk) 20:33, 13 November 2018 (UTC)

ArbCom 2018 election voter message

Hello, CFCF. Voting in the 2018 Arbitration Committee elections is now open until 23.59 on Sunday, 3 December. All users who registered an account before Sunday, 28 October 2018, made at least 150 mainspace edits before Thursday, 1 November 2018 and are not currently blocked are eligible to vote. Users with alternate accounts may only vote once.

The Arbitration Committee is the panel of editors responsible for conducting the Wikipedia arbitration process. It has the authority to impose binding solutions to disputes between editors, primarily for serious conduct disputes the community has been unable to resolve. This includes the authority to impose site bans, topic bans, editing restrictions, and other measures needed to maintain our editing environment. The arbitration policy describes the Committee's roles and responsibilities in greater detail.

If you wish to participate in the 2018 election, please review the candidates and submit your choices on the voting page. MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 18:42, 19 November 2018 (UTC)

Facto Post – Issue 18 – 30 November 2018

Facto Post – Issue 18 – 30 November 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.

WikiCite issue

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.

Wikidata training for librarians at WikiCite 2018

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.

Links

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)

The Signpost: 1 December 2018

This Month in GLAM: November 2018





Headlines
  • Albania report: Wiki Photo Walk Albania 2018; Wiki Loves Monuments Albania
  • Armenia report: Singing Wikipedia; Photographs by Vahan Kochar
  • Brazil report: Diverse milestones for the Brazilian community
  • Denmark report: Intercontinental digitisation efforts
  • Estonia report: Making contacts both internationally and in Estonia
  • Finland report: Art and edit-a-thons
  • France report: Bibliothèque publique d’information; 3D museum collections on Wikimedia Commons
  • Indonesia report: Conserving and digitizing texts in West Sumatra
  • Macedonia report: Wiki Training at National and University Library "St. Clement of Ohrid"
  • New Zealand report: Equity, Wikidata, and the New York Times
  • Norway report: Collaboration with The National Archives of Norway
  • Philippines report: Wiki Loves Art
  • Poland report: Archival image uploads, student collaborations and international projects
  • Serbia report: Photo finish of the WIR's
  • Sweden report: The Swedish Performing Arts Agency; Library data starts to take shape; Learning Wikipedia at the Archives; Wikimedia Commons Data Roundtripping
  • UK report: Sum of All Astrolabes
  • USA report: Wikidata Workshop at Pratt School of Information; Wikidata Presentation for the New York Technical Services Librarians; Wikipedia Asian Month; Cleveland Park Wikipedia Edit-a-thon; Historic Ivy Hill Cemetery Workshop
  • Wikipedia Library report: Books & Bytes–Issue 31, October–November 2018
  • WMF GLAM report: Welcoming Satdeep Gill; Structured Data on Commons; WikiCite
  • Calendar: December's GLAM events
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About This Month in GLAM · Subscribe/Unsubscribe · Global message delivery · Romaine 05:56, 11 December 2018 (UTC)

Nomination for deletion of Template:Anatomists

Template:Anatomists has been nominated for deletion. You are invited to comment on the discussion at the template's entry on the Templates for discussion page. Frietjes (talk) 14:25, 12 December 2018 (UTC)

A barnstar for you!

The Brilliant Idea Barnstar
Great idea for {{Anatomists}}! Didn't realise it existed until now - have started to deploy. Hope you're well, long time no collaborating :) Tom (LT) (talk) 01:10, 13 December 2018 (UTC)

Merry Xmas

--Ozzie10aaaa (talk) 14:07, 13 December 2018 (UTC)

Books & Bytes, Issue 31

The Wikipedia Library

Books & Bytes
Issue 31, October – Novemeber 2018

  • OAWiki
  • Wikimedia and Libraries User Group update
  • Global branches update
  • Bytes in brief

French version of Books & Bytes is now available on meta!
Read the full newsletter

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery on behalf of The Wikipedia Library team --MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 14:34, 21 December 2018 (UTC)

The Signpost: 24 December 2018

Merry Xmas

Merry Christmas and a Prosperous 2019!

Hello CFCF, may you be surrounded by peace, success and happiness on this seasonal occasion. Spread the WikiLove by wishing another user a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year, whether it be someone you have had disagreements with in the past, a good friend, or just some random person. Sending you heartfelt and warm greetings for Christmas and New Year 2019.
Happy editing,

Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 06:12, 25 December 2018 (UTC)

Spread the love by adding {{subst:Seasonal Greetings}} to other user talk pages.

Facto Post – Issue 19 – 27 December 2018

Facto Post – Issue 19 – 27 December 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.

Learning from Zotero

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.

Zotero logo

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.

Zotero demo video

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.

Links

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)

Nomination for deletion of Template:Anatomy resources

Template:Anatomy resources has been nominated for deletion. You are invited to comment on the discussion at the template's entry on the Templates for discussion page. Pkbwcgs (talk) 19:36, 28 December 2018 (UTC)

This Month in GLAM: December 2018





Headlines
  • Armenia report: Cooperation with Yerevan Drama Theatre Named After Hrachia Ghaplanian; Singing Wikipedia (continuation); Photographs by Vahan Kochar (continuation)
  • Australia report: 2019 Australia's Year of the Public Domain
  • Belgium report: Writing weeks German-speaking Community; End of year drink; Wiki Loves Heritage photo contest
  • Brazil report: Google Art and GLAM initiatives in Brazil
  • India report: Collaboration with RJVD Municipal Public Library
  • Italy report: Challenges and alliances with libraries, WLM and more
  • Macedonia report: Exhibition:"Poland through photographs" & Wikipedia lectures with children in social risk
  • Malaysia report: Technology Talk and Update on Wikipedia @ National Library of Malaysia
  • Portugal report: Glam Days '18 at the National Library of Portugal
  • Sweden report: Hats 🎩🧢👒🎓
  • UK report: Oxford
  • USA report: Holiday gatherings and visit to Internet Archive
  • Wikidata report: Wikidata reports
  • WMF GLAM report: Structured Data on Wikimedia Commons: pilot projects and multilingual captions
  • Calendar: January's GLAM events
Read this edition in fullSingle-page

To assist with preparing the newsletter, please visit the newsroom. Past editions may be viewed here.

About This Month in GLAM · Subscribe/Unsubscribe · Global message delivery · Romaine 19:58, 10 January 2019 (UTC)

Thank you for being one of Wikipedia's top medical contributors!

The 2018 Cure Award
In 2018 you were one of the top ~250 medical editors across any language of Wikipedia. Thank you from Wiki Project Med Foundation for helping bring free, complete, accurate, up-to-date health information to the public. We really appreciate you and the vital work you do! Wiki Project Med Foundation is a user group whose mission is to improve our health content. Consider joining here, there are no associated costs.

Thanks again :-) -- Doc James along with the rest of the team at Wiki Project Med Foundation 17:41, 28 January 2019 (UTC)

The Signpost: 31 January 2019

Facto Post – Issue 20 – 31 January 2019

Facto Post – Issue 20 – 31 January 2019

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.

Everything flows (and certainly data does)

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?).

Amazon Echo device using the Amazon Alexa service in voice search showdown with the Google rival on an Android phone

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.

Links

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MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 10:53, 31 January 2019 (UTC)

Nasal septum deviation

information Note: Nasal_septum_deviation#Diagnosis.--Hildeoc (talk) 15:30, 5 February 2019 (UTC)

This Month in GLAM: January 2019





Headlines
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About This Month in GLAM · Subscribe/Unsubscribe · Global message delivery · Romaine 13:59, 9 February 2019 (UTC)

I wish you wouldn't

It's ugly and borderline incomprehensible. Guy (Help!) 19:38, 22 February 2019 (UTC)

Books & Bytes, Issue 32

The Wikipedia Library

Books & Bytes
Issue 32, January – February 2019

  • #1Lib1Ref
  • New and expanded partners
  • Wikimedia and Libraries User Group update
  • Global branches update
  • Bytes in brief

French version of Books & Bytes is now available on meta!

Read the full newsletter

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery on behalf of The Wikipedia Library team --MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 03:29, 26 February 2019 (UTC)

Facto Post – Issue 21 – 28 February 2019

Facto Post – Issue 21 – 28 February 2019

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.

What is a systematic review?

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.

PRISMA flow diagram for a systematic review

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?

File:Schittny, Facing East, 2011, Legacy Projects.jpg
2011 photograph by Bernard Schittny of the "Legacy Projects" group

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.

Links

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MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 10:01, 28 February 2019 (UTC)

Me

Re: the videos, since it seems you have not read the entire MED thread, I am deaf, I rely on subtitles for that sort of thing and the examples are useless. They really are. I know most medics are terrible at communicating with deaf people - even those who specialise in ENT - but there I expect better from the oh-so-touchy-feely WMF. - Sitush (talk) 10:26, 28 February 2019 (UTC)

The Signpost: 28 February 2019

Nomination for deletion of Template:Infobox drug/simplified

Template:Infobox drug/simplified has been nominated for deletion. You are invited to comment on the discussion at the template's entry on the Templates for discussion page. Zackmann (Talk to me/What I been doing) 18:13, 28 February 2019 (UTC)

This Month in GLAM: February 2019





Headlines
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About This Month in GLAM · Subscribe/Unsubscribe · Global message delivery · Romaine 07:55, 8 March 2019 (UTC)

Nomination of Lisa Littman for deletion

A discussion is taking place as to whether the article Lisa Littman is suitable for inclusion in Wikipedia according to Wikipedia's policies and guidelines or whether it should be deleted.

The article will be discussed at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Lisa Littman until a consensus is reached, and anyone, including you, is welcome to contribute to the discussion. The nomination will explain the policies and guidelines which are of concern. The discussion focuses on high-quality evidence and our policies and guidelines.

Users may edit the article during the discussion, including to improve the article to address concerns raised in the discussion. However, do not remove the article-for-deletion notice from the top of the article. Safrolic (talk) 09:18, 19 March 2019 (UTC)

Input desired on new ROGD page

Sorry to keep pestering you but I would really value it if you could look at the newly created Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria page. Although it's named almost like a well known medical condition and claims to be covering a medical topic there are zero Wikipedia:MEDRES sources used to support the claims and nearly all references are unscientific in nature and belong to some kind of USA culture wars centered site like National Review or Newscorp sites. I find it a bit concerning because that is a departure of our usual standards of requiring reviews and clinical studies make up our medical articles. Freepsbane (talk) 21:58, 19 March 2019 (UTC)

Template:Tempalte display listed at Redirects for discussion

An editor has asked for a discussion to address the redirect Template:Tempalte display. Since you had some involvement with the Template:Tempalte display redirect, you might want to participate in the redirect discussion if you wish to do so. UnitedStatesian (talk) 13:38, 25 March 2019 (UTC)

Facto Post – Issue 22 – 28 March 2019

Facto Post – Issue 22 – 28 March 2019

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.

When in the cloud, do as the APIs do

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.

File:Cloud-API-Logo.svg
Logo of Cloud API on Google Cloud Platform

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.

Links

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MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 11:45, 28 March 2019 (UTC)

The Signpost: 31 March 2019

FYI

This is a standard message to notify contributors about an administrative ruling in effect. It does not imply that there are any issues with your contributions to date.

You have shown interest in complementary and alternative medicine. Due to past disruption in this topic area, a more stringent set of rules called discretionary sanctions is in effect. Any administrator may impose sanctions on editors who do not strictly follow Wikipedia's policies, or the page-specific restrictions, when making edits related to the topic.

For additional information, please see the guidance on discretionary sanctions and the Arbitration Committee's decision here. If you have any questions, or any doubts regarding what edits are appropriate, you are welcome to discuss them with me or any other editor.

This is a standard message to notify contributors about an administrative ruling in effect. It does not imply that there are any issues with your contributions to date.

You have shown interest in pseudoscience and fringe science. Due to past disruption in this topic area, a more stringent set of rules called discretionary sanctions is in effect. Any administrator may impose sanctions on editors who do not strictly follow Wikipedia's policies, or the page-specific restrictions, when making edits related to the topic.

For additional information, please see the guidance on discretionary sanctions and the Arbitration Committee's decision here. If you have any questions, or any doubts regarding what edits are appropriate, you are welcome to discuss them with me or any other editor.

Natureium (talk) 19:52, 24 April 2019 (UTC)

Facto Post – Issue 23 – 30 April 2019

Facto Post – Issue 23 – 30 April 2019

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.

Completely clouded?
Cloud computing logo

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.

Links

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MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 11:27, 30 April 2019 (UTC)

The Signpost: 30 April 2019

Chemtrails - a medical conspiracy theory?

Hi - I saw you involved in a debate about categorising these subjects a while back & I hope you don't mind but I'm curious about your thinking?

I ask myself, what is needed to believe in chemtrails? Talking to people it seems that first of all they don't know anything about how vapour trails are formed & so they also don't understand how differing atmospheric conditions affect the production of vapour trails. What is more striking though of course is that they're unable to imagine the extent of participation of the general population necessary if 'chemtrailing' were really being carried out, why aren't there more whistleblowers? (presumably they assume there must have been a few whistleblowers for them to have become 'aware' of what they think is going on.)

Then I ask what is needed to believe in the efficacy of an alternative medical therapy? One needs either (i) to know or have met somebody whose medical condition improved following a visit to an alternative therapist or (ii) to have tried out an alternative therapy oneself & experienced it as beneficial. (Or of course (iii) a person might have no experience at all but simply be pre-disposed to believe in unscientific things.)

Do you see why I would see these as distinct categories of belief? 86.148.15.134 (talk) 20:07, 4 May 2019 (UTC)

This Month in GLAM: April 2019





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Facto Post – Issue 24 – 17 May 2019

Facto Post – Issue 24 – 17 May 2019
Text mining display of noun phrases from the US Presidential Election 2012

The Editor is Charles Matthews, for ContentMine. Please leave feedback for him, on his User talk page.
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Semantic Web and TDM – a ContentMine view

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.

ScienceSourceReview, introductory video: but you need run it from the original upload file on Commons
Links for participation

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.


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MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 18:52, 17 May 2019 (UTC)

Books & Bytes, Issue 33

The Wikipedia Library

Books & Bytes
Issue 33, March – April 2019

  • #1Lib1Ref
  • Wikimedia and Libraries User Group update
  • Global branches update
  • Bytes in brief

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Sent by MediaWiki message delivery on behalf of The Wikipedia Library team --MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 06:41, 21 May 2019 (UTC)

The Signpost: 31 May 2019