The pain that is in maintaining lists of African governmental politicians

At the French Wikipedia, there is a category with 16 Finance ministers of Morocco. A category is an unsorted list and the French category contains a few more entries than the English category. Both Wikipedias do not have a (sorted) list.

I maintain list of African heads of state and African governmental ministers, so this is just a next list to prepare. The workflow is as follows: I create an item for a position, on the talk page I add a template that contains the data and pointers to what is missing. Typically such information can be found on a Wikipedia list, this time I have to rely on templates on Wikipedia articles.. All my lists are "works in progress" and are on my watch list.

I have added copies of the Listeria lists to many Wikipedias. The texts are in English, the data is shown in the local language. It being in English is a reason to refuse these lists in several communities.

The Listeria functionality is replaced by Wikimedia Foundation maintained software. All the list definitions and expressions exist in one place. The data is shown in a language that can be selected. When a list changes, it is reflected on watch lists. You can watch for all data and possibly for data and labels in "your" language. A project can opt in to enable the use of these lists when they don't, functionality is available to compare a list with the centrally maintained list.

Thanks, GerardM 

Buying #software

The software industry insisted that you do not buy a product but that you acquire a license. According to the highest court in the Netherlands this is not the case. In a blog post (in Dutch) Arnoud Engelfried informs about the consequences.

• As it is a product that is bought and sold, the supplier has to conform with all the rules that apply to the sale of goods
• Software can be expected to provide working functionality
• When it does not, the supplier has to amend the situation

With this change in the status of software all the mechanisms that consumers have will kick in. Including rules and regulations around sale over the Internet (you can return such goods within a given time-frame).

It will be interesting to learn how the software industry will respond.

Thanks,

     GerardM