About screw worms and the plague, with a Wikimedia angle

Screw worms and the plague are indigenous to the USA. When left untreated they are deadly. They appear regularly as key in the Youtubes the algorithm presents me. Consequently I often add data on Wikidata.

Recently I did some work on Kenneth L. Gage. He is/was with the CDC. Given the amount of papers to his name, he has/had a distinguished career. Mr Cage has/had many co-authors. Many of them work/worked at the CDC. They are the ones who protect/protected the USA against the plague.

At Wikidata we know about Mr Gage, his papers, his expertise. We could know about his career at the CDC and the careers of his co-authors. Given that these are facts that you do not easily find anywhere else it easily gives the WMF a platform with established facts, not necessarily neutral from a political point of view but verifiably true. 

With a platform where Youtubes get connected to Wikimedia sources we could provide information that the USA press no longer offers. They are bought and verifiably no longer bring the news, all the news.

Thanks,

      GerardM

What is good for the goose is good for the gander

The English Wikipedia banned a source used to prove the veracity of statements made in articles. That is in itself not a problem, the problem is that it had been a source that provided proof that could not be substantiated in any other way. 

The problem was with a feud with parties outside of the own organisation.They were threatened, abused.What clinched the argument for the ban was that they changed the narrative by altering the content they provided.

The organisation banned was not the Trump government of the United States of America.

Thanks,

     GerardM

Reliable sources for Wikimedia in the time of Minnesota in Winter

There are government engineered riots in the streets of Minnesota, people are dying. The sources for what transpires; the traditional sources of repute are suspect. Government sources deliberately polish what transpires to the extend that its lies are obvious given video documentation showing proof of the opposite. News cooperations operate on the basis of "balanced reporting" consequently obvious falsehoods get equal attention invalidating reliability for these traditional sources.

The best that can be said about USA government publications is that it publishes its policy however it no longer provides us with a reliable source. It no longer has the organisations that had a quality making their publications qualify as reliable. Examples abound; think health, climate, traffic, trade, military.

Wikimedia serves a global public. Arguably foreign sources became more reliable and respectable, more likely to provide a narrative that clashes with what some in the USA expect to hear. 

The Wikimedia Foundation is an organisation based in the United States, its infrastructure is centred in the USA. I fear for for the continuity of its products and its quality. It is not a given that this will remain given a US government going to court with the BBC because of what it considers partisan reporting. Wikimedia aims to provide a neutral point of view but given that its traditional sources are increasingly suspect, that it operates in an environment that is no longer free. Given that its bias is also in what it does not cover, I wonder how we measure Wikipedia as a reliable source.

Thanks,

       GerardM

The @Wikimedia's #endowment aim is to reduce risk.

When you assess risk, when the purpose of the Wikimedia's endowment is to ensure the future operation of Wikipedia and probably other projects like Commons as well, money is not the only risk to consider.

The current government of the USA operates in a way that poses no or little thread to the continued operation of the WMF. However, the USA is a two party system and the same can not be said when the Republican Party is to return to power. 

All the servers that run the Wikimedia projects are currently in the United States. With servers able to run the full stack of Wikimedia projects elsewhere, two objectives are served. 

• up to date data becomes closer to the readers close to the new servers
• the risk of an USA that turns on the Wikimedia Foundation is mitigated

The WMF does not need to use the endowment to make this happen. Given its current finances, it should be an operational decision.

Thanks,

        GerardM

Black representation matters, the Congressional Black Caucus

A friend asked me to help bolster the notability of black scientists. I was told of a "black caucus" with chairs and a list would help. I googled and found a black caucus with chairs and we did not know them at Wikidata. They were the chairs of the Congressional Black Caucus. Maybe not the caucus intended but of such a prominence that I added them all.

These are only the leaders and obviously over time the membership of the Congressional Black Caucus changed with the different elections. Someone else may add the data. 

The information I used could be found on English Wikipedia and is part of the article about the Congressional Black Caucus. Typically, when a position is considered important enough, it has its own article. When it does, it has more relevance and more information is available about the relevance and the history of such a position.

When Black representation matters, you want substantial lists and articles both on Wikidata and Wikipedia.

Thanks,

     GerardM

The CDC and its National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases

Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, there is so much attention to every aspect of it; the epidemiology, virology, vaccination, co-morbidity. Mix it with a heady mix of economics, profiteering and graft and what are you to think of it all. What is fact and what is not.

When I read that there is an "Outbreak Management Team" in the Netherlands, an advisory body to the Dutch government, I had a look. I added all the known scientists to Wikidata, looked for "authority identifiers" and attributed some of the papers that are likely theirs to them. It generated a really nice Scholia for them and the team as well.

At first I wanted to do similar European organisations but it takes quite some effort to find them. So I took the easy route and went for the CDC. Its organisational chart contains a wealth or smaller orgs among the the NCIRD and it has its own organisational chart. I did the same routine, adding the obvious scientists to Wikidata, looked for the authority identifiers for them, attributed papers.

The best bit? While adding people one at a time, you see how the Scholia evolves. Authors are reordered based on their number of papers, you find the ones that are co-authors and colleagues. The latest papers are shown first.. It is nice. However, this is management only, I cannot wait and see it evolve as staff finds its place in the Scholia as well.
Thanks,
     GerardM

The value of incomplete data - Fellows of the Ecological Society of America

This is about understanding data in Wikidata. The article is about understanding what you can and cannot do with incomplete data, it is not so much about the Ecological Society of America.

The most recent work started with the news of a new Wikipedia article. Prof Cottingham is a 2015 fellow of the esa, there is a category for fellows, adding her and other missing fellows to Wikidata showed that for one fellow there was no Wikipedia article. At the time there were 90 known fellows and for only two it was known when they became a member.

I expected that new fellows would be known to Wikidata not just as an "author string" but that they would be an "item". So I added 14 of the 2019 cohort and found this not to be the case. I then looked up the known fellows from the esa webpage, added their date to Wikidata because I wondered if it were particularly the older fellows that are represented in Wikipedia.

While adding the dates, I added many alternate names to aid disambiguation, I removed one item and found two false friends; fathers mistaken for their son. When I was done, I had a good impression of the data on the website and even though I do not have the full numbers, I feel to be correct in my belief that it is the old ecology/ecologists that are represented in Wikipedia.

When you scrutinize the list of fellows, you will find included "Early Career Fellows", they are "elected for advancing the science of ecology and showing promise for continuing contributions" and they take part for a limited amount of time. Programs like these are known from all over the world and from many science orgs. This time I did not spend time on them but from previous experience I can safely say that promising is putting it mildly.

Wikidata is a wiki and as such, the work that I did is of value even though it is incomplete. I did not add all the missing fellows for instance. The esa is very much an organisation for America (check the employment of its fellows) and it takes pride in global attention and solicits membership fees from all over the world. It takes a lot of additional data when you want to compare if its subject matter is biased towards America and in what way.

For many of the fellows I added, there are papers with "author strings" waiting to be linked to an author. The same can be said for the fellows that are still missing. It can be compared to other ecological organisations but how to deal with the differences takes a completely different understanding. It takes more data to make this possible but the data does not need to be complete, that is the beauty of averages.
Thanks,
       GerardM

#Science and America first

Several US American science organisations are quite adamant that for them, it is America first. Stupidity has its place and these days the United States has a lot of it particularly as those same science organisations expect people from the rest of the world to accept "pre-eminence" of the USA.

There may be good reasons to be a member of these organisations but from my perspective, it is one thing to be with stupid, it is another to have these organisations argue their case on "your" behalf. So when you are a scientist, chances are that we already know you at Wikidata. We may even know about your science, your co-authors, your memberships.

Take for instance Prof Lise Korsten, she is probably South African, this is her Scholia. She has many co-authors and for some we do not know their gender and for most we do not know their nationality. We do not know if she is a member of any science organisation and we do not know that for her co-authors either. So you may add your professional memberships at Wikidata, your nationality and when you do know the nationality of your co-authors, you may add that as well.

In this way we make obvious to US American stupid that science is global.
Thanks,
       GerardM

The #decline of #Wikipedia (as we know it)

Regularly, we are told about misgivings about Wikipedia. It can not stay as it is, it is in decline; it is all doom and gloom.  NB the use of the phrase "doom and gloom" increased in the 1950s.

So Wikipedia will not remain as we know it? GOOD, it forces us to think how we can improve what we have. When things are to change, what will have a healthy impact? How will we get something that serves us better in "sharing the sum of all knowledge". How will we get more people use what we have to offer and how will we entice more people to contribute to the data collection that is included in all the Wikimedia Foundation projects.

First thing; our projects need to be less US-American. For me, a POV situation I was in, was "obviously"decided in favour of only considering the USA point of view; I let it slide but went to pastures green. The money we raise is for: "keeping the servers going". An objective a bit too limited to my taste but it raises the cash. Money is mainly raised in the USA but in order to be truly global, it is better to raise more equally in every country at least for the amount it cost to serve it. Gapminder is where you may be reminded that money is everywhere. As to the servers, why have all crucial eggs in one USA basket? Given its current politics, there is indeed a potential doom and gloom scenario possible. Having them more dispersed will bring our data closer to our audience, our editors as well. Benefiting them with better performance; that is the easy win. A more complicated solution is in the implementation of the Vrije Universiteit research of a peer to peer MediaWiki.

When our projects are to be less US-American, it is important for spending to be more global too.

When today's Wikipedia practices are no longer considered to be set in stone, we can finally implement features that enable, ensure and enhance its future. First, we should be less self centric; after all there is only one sum of all knowledge and we define only a part of it. Magnus showed how to maintain lists in an efficient way and Amir added recently a "task" to Phabricator to implement proper disambiguation of "red links". We are increasingly aware, not only of the references of all Wikipedias but also of publications by scientists that enable their work to be found. Complement this with the scientific papers we publish and we improve the public relevance of scientists by making them findable, by pointing to their science.

With a changed approach at Wikipedia, we may be bold and change the outlook on what Wikipedia is there for as well. Why not make Wikipedia the gateway to information held elsewhere? Why not show a Scholia page for every scientist we know, why not offer the books at OpenLibrary or inform on the availability of books at the local library?  Why not partner with other organisation we have a shared objective in. But most importantly let us be aware that an African professor teaches in Africa and that we allow for and enable the context of our partners and volunteers.

For me there is no reason for doom and gloom as there are so many opportunities to become even more effective. With a whole new year in front of us; let us do well.
Thanks,
        GerardM

#Wikimedia - The George Polk Award winners; how to catch them all

It is this time of year again; the George Polk Awards have been announced. Last year I spend a lot of time adding information to and cleaning the data at Wikidata. There are over 500 award winners known so Reasonator does not catch them all.  Listeria shows more data but multiple entries are an issue.

There are multiple reasons to complete a list like this. In this way celebrated journalists like Michael Winerip  or Michael Schwirtz finally get their presence in the Wikimedia world. It is a way to celebrate journalism, important enough in this time of fake news and, it is a demonstration how data at Wikidata can extend the quality of Wikipedia's information.

Given the amount of award winners, it takes too much time to do all the work in one go. It is now largely a matter of adding the red and "black" linked award winners. At this time it is the 2014 award winners who are being added.

The problem is that time spend on one award takes away time from other projects, equally deserving. Projects like completing information on US governors or British governors. How to register information like epidemics because their impact is not fully appreciated. How to make plain that a source has a negative impact when it is actually retracted..

Anyway, congratulation to the George Polk Award winners for 2017; that their career may blossom with this recognition.
Thanks,
     GerardM

#Wikidata - William Gorges, first colonial governor of the Province of Maine

Mr Gorges was born in Britain, he died in Britain. He was tasked to oversee investments for two years by a nephew and as a result he was the first colonial governor of the province of Maine. Consequently he is said to be a citizen of the USA, (he died in February 1658)..

The problem with nationality and citizenship is that we tend to adopt people as belonging to something that did not exist at the time and consequently it is a falsehood. It is the same with all these generals, governors of the confederacy; they did not identify with the United States of America, they had their own state they swore allegiance to, so why call them citizen of the USA? How dare we?

It is the same for people from Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland. They may have opposed the Brits but from a nationality point of view, their behaviour was judged by the British laws.

Associating people with states / nations that may not even have existed at the time are false facts, pure and simple.
Thanks,
       GerardM

#Wikidata - Just another award; the 2018 Newberry Library Award

I read it on Twitter; Mrs Carla Hayden received the 2018 Newberry Library Award. There are many awards that do not keep track of all the awardees. Personally I found only one other award winner. I asked on Twitter for more information and a friend found several more.

This is one of the awards that I want to keep track of. So I added a Listeria page on my user page. Every time the underlying data changes, Listeria will pick it up.

In the mean time, Mrs Hayden, congratulations.
Thanks,
       GerardM

#Wikimedia - #Personal - there is no silver bullet

For everything that ails any of the #Wikimedia projects, there is no silver bullet. To complicate things, there is no agreement what it is that ails these projects mostly because there is hardly any collaboration.

I am not a Wikipedian. I love Wikipedia but I do not identify with it. I have been involved in many projects including Wikipedia and my global account is testament to that. My involvements have been substantial and central in my motivation is: how can we share the sum of all knowledge, how will we reach the biggest audience and have the biggest effect.

I have been called "monomaniacal with my silver bullet du jour". Over time several topics have occupied me and this has resulted in an evolving understanding of what I perceive as issues with what we do and how we do it. When you are interested in how my opinions evolved, read my blog, it runs from 2005.

The English Wikipedia is Wikimedia's success. Its biggest problem; over 50% of its target audience does not speak English. At that, organisational attention in any project attention is mostly for English. There are several solutions possible that help us "share the sum of the knowledge that is available" more widely.

• localisation of the user interface makes our software better usable and more user friendly
• the user interface of Wikidata makes it easy and obvious to add labels in *your* languages
• the data of Wikidata is used to generate texts that are cached, not saved, when there is no Wikipedia article on the subject
• Advertise the information we have; things like finished books in Wikisource

I do promote translatewiki.net for the localisation of the MediaWiki software and I would love to see the Internet Archive and the OCLC to use translatewiki.net and have their services localised in all the languages that Wikipedia supports.

Reasonator is still the best interface on the Wikidata data. Data becomes informative and it makes it easy to add labels in *your* language. In essence this is again all about "sharing in the sum of all available knowledge". Hidden gems are the "Concept cloud" and the QRcode available on every Reasonator page. Reasonator is just one of the many tools by Magnus that makes Wikidata usable.

My main motto is "what is the purpose". When I was particularly involved in Wiktionary, I collaborated with many people in many Wiktionaries and this is where I learned to appreciate the lack of coordination that exists between projects. Thanks to wonderful people like Sabine Cretella, I developed the ideas and in the end a data model for a project that became the basis for OmegaWiki. This data model was inspected and approved by among others Alan K. Melby. Thanks to Jimbo I got into contact with Barend Mons and became involved in bio-medical data and science. The development of OmegaWiki happened parallel to the main work in Wikiproteins.

At this time Wikidata and the opportunities it presents has my interest. Contrary to some, I am not an apologist for everything Wikidata and contrary to what some say, I do not blame the development team but the group pressures that so often result in unhappy compromises and decisions. It is for instance an acknowledged fact that Wikidata descriptions are problematic and that automated descriptions are superior.. "Never mind; it is what we do" is the prevailing sentiment.. (as always).

There is no silver bullet and consequently a result is only achieved after a lot of work. I want functionality that mimics an Algerian project I blogged about way back in 2013. To achieve this I am adding dates to the governorships of all USA states. It allows for queries like this. A next stage will be when a map of the USA is shown with all its states and a slider to move in time. It is then easy to show the governors at that time..

I am not sorry that I keep on returning to issues mentioned it the past, what some people miss is the amount of continuous effort that goes into achieving them.
Thanks,
      GerardM

#Wikidata - #Reebok Human Rights award

Once upon a time, there was a company called Reebok who presented an award to human rights activists under the age of 30. Every year four or five people received $50,000.--. Every year attention was given to human rights. Important enough because an award like this gives additional relevance and resonance for an extremely good cause. It may even provide some extra protection by making people more visible.

The award is no longer presented. Some people who were recognised  refused the award because in their opinion Reebok itself should take care about its human right record. Some people took actions and they were successful; the last award ceremony was in 2007. That is all; a lot less attention for human rights, defeat in victory.

The best information about the Reebok Human Rights Award is at the Internet Archive's Wayback machine.  Nothing wrong with the credentials as stated of the people who were awarded.. When you compare this with the linked people at Wikipedia, you will miss the Chilean soccer player, the Nigerian business magnate and find what are Wikipedia red links.
Thanks,
      GerardM

#Wikidata vs #Wikipedia - Rukmini Maria Callimachi

Mrs Callimachi did not only win the Polk Award, she is both a journalist and a poet and did not only win journalism awards. One of the awards, the Michael Kelly Award is hidden on the Wikipedia article of Michael Kelly. 

This article is about how Wikidata and English Wikipedia can help each other. The Wikipedia article lists seven awards and this makes it easy to add other award winners for them as well.

Thanks to Magnus' awarder, this is fairly easy but some awards hide out as part of an article and the award has to be added in Wikidata.  It may be one reason why later awards are missing. The religious award she is said to have won, it is a different award with a similar name. The award and the organisation that confers it had to be created.

The point, we can compare data at a Wikipedia with what we have on Wikidata. They should match. When they do not, there is an issue. Copying the data from Wikipedia is easy and it is the obvious thing to do. When Wikipedians decry the quality of Wikidata, they should reflect on why this is the case. When we collaborate, we will slowly but surely improve our quality. In the final analysis our aim is the same; share in the sum of all knowledge.
Thanks,
      GerardM

#Wikipedia - Student or Athlete or both ?

College football, soccer, basketball, whatever is a USA phenomenon where young people attent a college or a university on a sports scholarship.

Wikipedia has categories for the different sports and members of such teams are these categories are typically a subcategory for the alumni of a college or university.

For Wikidata the alumni are typically harvested from the specific alumni catalogs and as a consequence it is as if all the athletes did not have an education.

My question, how can we best associate these college/university categories with the alumni categories?
Thanks,
      GerardM

#Wikipedia - #BlackLunchTable / Brooklyn Hip Hop

The Black Lunch Table project has an editathon on August 20th. It will focus on on important but underrepresented New York Hip Hop/rap artists.

In preparation they have created entries in Wikidata for artists with and without a Wikipedia article. In this way they can prepare information for the editors to use in their articles.

Magnus created a new tool and it shows who edited Wikidata. As a result we can create a query for the edits for the New York Hip hop event for the month of August.

It shows who has been doing all the work.
Thanks,
      GerardM

#Wikimedia project - #PlantsAndPeople

#Wikidata is a great to encourage collaboration and reporting for Wiki projects. The results of projects like the Black Lunch Table have been encouraging so for; reports for articles in multiple languages, gender ratios were possible because of the Wikidata link.

A new initiative is PlantsAndPeople. There have been editathons in the past and more are planned. It is about both people and plants so the kind of questions that may be asked will be quite interesting. For instance how many taxons were described by the people in the project and how many people were honoured in taxon names.

At this moment the people who are the subject of editathons are added. This list will grow slowly but surely and only once it is done, it can replace list in Wikipedia. It will take quite some time to get there because it makes sense to add additional data as well. This is the best way to quickly improve the quality of the data involved. So far quite a number of mycologists and ethnobotanists have been added. A question has been raised in Wikidata about people named in taxons and a picture that should be in Commons is waiting for someone else to transfer it.

When you are interested; join in the fun.
Thanks,
      GerardM

#Wikidata and #Libraries - RAMP and #WorldCat identifiers

There are books and there are authors. Libraries are first and foremost in the book business. They register their books because otherwise they do not know what they have. Authors are important but they are secondary. Particularly the not so well known authors, authors with one book do not always get the full treatment. There is a registration, sort of, and it is waiting in the wings to be fully registered.

Libraries and librarians are Wikimedia's friends. A presentation from the IUPUI University Library shows how their wish for good documentation works for them. They release the rights to their "finding aids" and add missing "authority records" for people and companies. They then create Wikipedia articles based on their "finding aids" and add Wikidata records. They have it down to an art so much so that their tool, RAMP (Remixing Archival Metadata Project) lives as a web-based tool on WMFLabs. This invites any librarian anywhere to join the fun.

One of the articles is about Hugh Ned Brown. The article is good and the Wikidata is quite good as well. RAMP is a tool for librarians. It is wonderful and if there is one question left, it is how Wikimedians can contact librarians like the ones at IUPUI to fix the issues we find at our end.
Thanks,
      GerardM

#WhiteHouse Fellows - Mrs Margarita Colmenares

Mrs Margarita Colmenares is a White House Fellow. A message was posted on Twitter that her article had been created and to support the message, it was easy enough to add her on Wikidata as well. The article mentioned that she was a White House Fellow and adding one layer of additional information is one way of making a person more relevant.

Adding this fellowship and adding other people who were a fellow was easy enough. The Wikipedia article referred to the website of the White House for information and when you visit its website you will be thanked for having an interest in this subject.

At a time like this it is good to consider Archive.org.  Its crawler worked well at some dates for other dates the message you will see is: "Got an HTTP 301 response at crawl time".

Anyway.. Together, the information at whitehouse.gov and at archive.org provide enough of a reference.
Thanks,
     GerardM