Welcome

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Welcome!

Hello, Metacladistics, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are some pages that you might find helpful:

I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! Please sign your messages on discussion pages using four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically insert your username and the date. If you need help, check out Wikipedia:Questions, ask me on my talk page, or ask your question on this page and then place {{help me}} before the question. Again, welcome! T H F S W (T · C · E) 19:50, 21 February 2011 (UTC)Reply

June 2013

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  • ] (b. [[1915 in science|1915]]), [[United States|American]] [[virologist]] and co-winner of a [[Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine] for his work on [[polio]].

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  • * February 28 - [[Leon Cooper]], [[United States|American]] [[physicist] and [[Nobel Prize for Physics|Nobel Prize winner]].

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A cup of coffee for you!

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  Thanks for your interest in developing science content on Wikipedia. I and many others do this as well. If you ever want to talk Wikipedia, feel free to contact me personally and we can look at things together while talking on Skype or phone. I want to support you in disseminating whatever information is important to you. Thanks! Blue Rasberry (talk) 09:56, 21 June 2013 (UTC)Reply

Sorry it took so long!

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Systematics Association, which you submitted to Articles for creation, has been created.

You are more than welcome to continue making quality contributions to Wikipedia. Note that because you are a logged-in user, you can create articles yourself, and don't have to post a request. However, you may continue submitting work to Articles for Creation if you prefer.

Thank you for helping improve Wikipedia!

MartinPoulter (talk) 22:44, 25 June 2013 (UTC)Reply

OER inquiry

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Hi Metacladistics, I'm sending you this message because you're one of about 300 users who have recently edited an article in the umbrella category of open educational resources (OER) (or open education). In evaluating several projects we've been working on (e.g. the WIKISOO course and WikiProject Open), my colleague Pete Forsyth and I have wondered who chooses to edit OER-related articles and why. Regardless of whether you've taken the WIKISOO course yourself - and/or never even heard the term OER before - we'd be extremely grateful for your participation in this brief, anonymous survey before 27 April. No personal data is being collected. If you have any ideas or questions, please get in touch. My talk page awaits. Thanks for your support! - Sara FB (talk) 20:45, 23 April 2014 (UTC)Reply

Editathon and Meetup invitations

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Open quaternary

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This is an automated message from CorenSearchBot. I have performed a web search with the contents of Open quaternary, and it appears to include material copied directly from http://www.openquaternary.com/about/.

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If substantial content is duplicated and it is not public domain or available under a compatible license, it will be deleted. For legal reasons, we cannot accept copyrighted text or images borrowed from other web sites or printed material. You may use such publications as a source of information, but not as a source of sentences. See our copyright policy for further details. (If you own the copyright to the previously published content and wish to donate it, see Wikipedia:Donating copyrighted materials for the procedure.) CorenSearchBot (talk) 20:59, 13 March 2015 (UTC)Reply

Wikipedia Science Conference

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Hello Ross, You're receiving this update because you asked to be informed about the Wikipedia Science Conference taking place in London on 2nd and 3rd of September. Thanks for your interest.

The call for proposals is now public and session proposals are coming in. The two keynotes, and some other invited speakers, have graciously accepted. In mid-May we will bring together a programme, a publicity poster, and an online booking form. Then we'll begin the main publicity and will need your help getting the word out.

Please put in a session proposal if you've been thinking of doing so: the deadline is the 8th May. This is far from the only way to be involved. The conference will need session moderators, a programme review group, and other volunteers: if there is a specific role you are interested in, or if you have any other questions, please email me at m.l.poulter bristol.ac.uk.

There will be a large "unconference" session in the programme and - fingers crossed - a "hackathon" event two days later on the Saturday, so even if you do not have a proposal accepted, you will have a chance to shape the conference activities.

Please pass on the word to any colleagues who might want to put in a proposal or help the conference in any way. Cheers, MartinPoulter (talk) 11:58, 14 March 2015 (UTC)Reply

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Proposed deletion of Open quaternary

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The article Open quaternary has been proposed for deletion because of the following concern:

Non-notable new journal. Not indexed in any selective databases, no independent sources. Does not meet WP:NJournals or WP:GNG.

While all constructive contributions to Wikipedia are appreciated, content or articles may be deleted for any of several reasons.

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.

Please consider improving the article to address the issues raised. Removing {{proposed deletion/dated}} will stop the proposed deletion process, but other deletion processes exist. In particular, the speedy deletion process can result in deletion without discussion, and articles for deletion allows discussion to reach consensus for deletion. Randykitty (talk) 13:56, 12 May 2015 (UTC)Reply

ArbCom elections are now open!

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Hi,
You appear to be eligible to vote in the current Arbitration Committee election. The Arbitration Committee is the panel of editors responsible for conducting the Wikipedia arbitration process. It has the authority to enact binding solutions for disputes between editors, primarily related to serious behavioural issues that the community has been unable to resolve. This includes the ability 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, you are welcome to review the candidates' statements and submit your choices on the voting page. For the Election committee, MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 14:28, 24 November 2015 (UTC)Reply

Datura innoxia

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I see that you have moved this article from Datura inoxia. It would help us all if you would justify this move on the article's talk page. The matter of the proper form for the name has come up before on that page. The name of the article has been stable for many years. As I search for both forms of the name, it seems to me that there are two spellings, neither of them authoritative. If there is a claim that one source is the authoritative one, it would be good to have something definitive about that. In its absence, somebody might undo your move and your edits. Lou Sander (talk) 17:43, 31 March 2016 (UTC)Reply

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  Hello Metacladistics. All or some of your addition(s) to Eva Crackles has had to be removed, as it appears to have added copyrighted material without permission from the copyright holder. While we appreciate your contributing to Wikipedia, there are certain things you must keep in mind about using information from your sources to avoid copyright or plagiarism issues here.

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Wikiversity Journal of Medicine, an open access peer reviewed journal with no charges, invites you to participate

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Hi

Did you know about Wikiversity Journal of Medicine? It is an open access, peer reviewed medical journal, with no publication charges. We welcome you to have a look. Feel free to participate.

You can participate in any one or more of the following ways:

The future of this journal as a separate Wikimedia project is under discussion and the name can be changed suitably. Currently a voting for the same is underway. Please cast your vote in the name you find most suitable. We would be glad to receive further suggestions from you. It is also acceptable to mention your votes in the wide-reach wikiversityjournal.org email list. Please note that the voting closes on 16th August, 2016, unless protracted by consensus, due to any reason.

-from Diptanshu.D (talk · contribs · count) and others of the Editorial Board, Wikiversity Journal of Medicine.

DiptanshuTalk 10:16, 7 August 2016 (UTC)Reply

ArbCom Elections 2016: Voting now open!

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Hello, Metacladistics. Voting in the 2016 Arbitration Committee elections is open from Monday, 00:00, 21 November through Sunday, 23:59, 4 December to all unblocked users who have registered an account before Wednesday, 00:00, 28 October 2016 and have made at least 150 mainspace edits before Sunday, 00:00, 1 November 2016.

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Nomination of Solid Earth (journal) for deletion

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A discussion is taking place as to whether the article Solid Earth (journal) 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/Solid Earth (journal) until a consensus is reached, and anyone 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. KDS4444 (talk) 14:33, 6 April 2017 (UTC)Reply

ArbCom 2017 election voter message

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Hello, Metacladistics. Voting in the 2017 Arbitration Committee elections is now open until 23.59 on Sunday, 10 December. All users who registered an account before Saturday, 28 October 2017, made at least 150 mainspace edits before Wednesday, 1 November 2017 and are not currently blocked are eligible to vote. Users with alternate accounts may only vote once.

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Facto Post – Issue 7 – 15 December 2017

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Facto Post – Issue 7 – 15 December 2017
 

A new bibliographical landscape

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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!

 
November 2017 map of geolocated Wikidata items, made by Addshore
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MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 14:54, 15 December 2017 (UTC)Reply

Facto Post – Issue 8 – 15 January 2018

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Facto Post – Issue 8 – 15 January 2018
 

Metadata on the March

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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.

 
SVG pedestrian crosses road
 
Zebra crossing/crosswalk, Singapore

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.

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MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 12:38, 15 January 2018 (UTC)Reply

Facto Post – Issue 9 – 5 February 2018

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Facto Post – Issue 9 – 5 February 2018
 

m:Grants:Project/ScienceSource is the new ContentMine proposal: please take a look.

Wikidata as Hub

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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.

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MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 11:50, 5 February 2018 (UTC)Reply

Facto Post – Issue 10 – 12 March 2018

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Facto Post – Issue 10 – 12 March 2018
 

Milestone for mix'n'match

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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!

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3D printing

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MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 12:26, 12 March 2018 (UTC)Reply

Facto Post – Issue 11 – 9 April 2018

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Facto Post – Issue 11 – 9 April 2018
 

The 100 Skins of the Onion

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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.

 
Red onion cross section

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.

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MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 16:25, 9 April 2018 (UTC)Reply

Facto Post – Issue 12 – 28 May 2018

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Facto Post – Issue 12 – 28 May 2018
 

ScienceSource funded

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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.

A medical canon?

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.

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OpenRefine logo, courtesy of Google

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MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 10:16, 28 May 2018 (UTC)Reply

Facto Post – Issue 13 – 29 May 2018

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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.

Respecting MEDRS

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.

 
Evidence pyramid leading up to clinical guidelines, from WP:MEDRS
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MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 18:19, 29 June 2018 (UTC)Reply

Facto Post – Issue 14 – 21 July 2018

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Facto Post – Issue 14 – 21 July 2018
 

The Editor is Charles Matthews, for ContentMine. Please leave feedback for him, on his User talk page.
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Plugging the gaps – Wikimania report

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.

 
Hackathon mentoring table wiring

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".

 
Plugbar buildup at the Hackathon
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MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 06:10, 21 July 2018 (UTC)Reply

Facto Post – Issue 15 – 21 August 2018

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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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Neglected diseases
 
Anti-parasitic drugs being distributed in Côte d'Ivoire
What's a Neglected Disease?, ScienceSource video

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.

Links

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MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 13:23, 21 August 2018 (UTC)Reply

Facto Post – Issue 16 – 30 September 2018

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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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The science publishing landscape
 

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.

 
Links

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MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 17:57, 30 September 2018 (UTC)Reply

Facto Post – Issue 17 – 29 October 2018

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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)Reply

Bulletin de la Société Géologique de France moved to draftspace

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An article you recently created, Bulletin de la Société Géologique de France, does not have enough sources and citations as written to remain published. It needs more citations from reliable, independent sources. (?) Information that can't be referenced should be removed (verifiability is of central importance on Wikipedia). I've moved your draft to draftspace (with a prefix of "Draft:" before the article title) where you can incubate the article with minimal disruption. When you feel the article meets Wikipedia's general notability guideline and thus is ready for mainspace, please click on the "Submit your draft for review!" button at the top of the page. Boleyn (talk) 08:44, 4 November 2018 (UTC)Reply

Cahiers Agricultures moved to draftspace

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An article you recently created, Cahiers Agricultures, does not have enough sources and citations as written to remain published. It needs more citations from reliable, independent sources. (?) Information that can't be referenced should be removed (verifiability is of central importance on Wikipedia). I've moved your draft to draftspace (with a prefix of "Draft:" before the article title) where you can incubate the article with minimal disruption. When you feel the article meets Wikipedia's general notability guideline and thus is ready for mainspace, please click on the "Submit your draft for review!" button at the top of the page. Boleyn (talk) 08:45, 4 November 2018 (UTC)Reply

Applied Hydroecology moved to draftspace

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An article you recently created, Applied Hydroecology, does not have enough sources and citations as written to remain published. It needs more citations from reliable, independent sources. (?) Information that can't be referenced should be removed (verifiability is of central importance on Wikipedia). I've moved your draft to draftspace (with a prefix of "Draft:" before the article title) where you can incubate the article with minimal disruption. When you feel the article meets Wikipedia's general notability guideline and thus is ready for mainspace, please click on the "Submit your draft for review!" button at the top of the page. Boleyn (talk) 08:55, 4 November 2018 (UTC)Reply

Your submission at Articles for creation: Bulletin de la Société Géologique de France (November 5)

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Your recent article submission to Articles for Creation has been reviewed! Unfortunately, it has not been accepted at this time. The reason left by AngusWOOF was:  The comment the reviewer left was: Please check the submission for any additional comments left by the reviewer. You are encouraged to edit the submission to address the issues raised and resubmit when they have been resolved.
AngusWOOF (barksniff) 00:29, 5 November 2018 (UTC)Reply
 
Hello, Metacladistics! Having an article declined at Articles for Creation can be disappointing. If you are wondering why your article submission was declined, please post a question at the Articles for creation help desk. If you have any other questions about your editing experience, we'd love to help you at the Teahouse, a friendly space on Wikipedia where experienced editors lend a hand to help new editors like yourself! See you there! AngusWOOF (barksniff) 00:29, 5 November 2018 (UTC)Reply

Your submission at Articles for creation: Bulletin de la Société Géologique de France has been accepted

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Bulletin de la Société Géologique de France, which you submitted to Articles for creation, has been created.
The article has been assessed as Stub-Class, which is recorded on the article's talk page. You may like to take a look at the grading scheme to see how you can improve the article.

You are more than welcome to continue making quality contributions to Wikipedia. If your account is more than four days old and you have made at least 10 edits you can create articles yourself without posting a request. However, you may continue submitting work to Articles for Creation if you prefer.

Thank you for helping improve Wikipedia!

AngusWOOF (barksniff) 14:20, 6 November 2018 (UTC)Reply

A page you started (Bulletin de la Société Géologique de France) has been reviewed!

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Thanks for creating Bulletin de la Société Géologique de France.

I have just reviewed the page, as a part of our page curation process.

Thanks for your work on this, are you able to help resolve the referencing issue?

To reply, leave a comment here and ping me.

Message delivered via the Page Curation tool, on behalf of the reviewer.

Boleyn (talk) 17:28, 6 November 2018 (UTC)Reply

@Boleyn: I think I can probably help but I might not fully understand what the problem is. Can you explain it? Metacladistics (talk) 19:40, 6 November 2018 (UTC)Reply

ArbCom 2018 election voter message

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Hello, Metacladistics. 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)Reply

Facto Post – Issue 18 – 30 November 2018

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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)Reply

Your submission at Articles for creation: Cahiers Agricultures has been accepted

edit
 
Cahiers Agricultures, which you submitted to Articles for creation, has been created.
The article has been assessed as Stub-Class, which is recorded on the article's talk page. You may like to take a look at the grading scheme to see how you can improve the article.

You are more than welcome to continue making quality contributions to Wikipedia. If your account is more than four days old and you have made at least 10 edits you can create articles yourself without posting a request. However, you may continue submitting work to Articles for Creation if you prefer.

Thank you for helping improve Wikipedia!

SITH (talk) 21:43, 15 December 2018 (UTC)Reply

Facto Post – Issue 19 – 27 December 2018

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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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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)Reply

Facto Post – Issue 20 – 31 January 2019

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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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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)Reply

Facto Post – Issue 21 – 28 February 2019

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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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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) 10:02, 28 February 2019 (UTC)Reply

Facto Post – Issue 22 – 28 March 2019

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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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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)Reply

A cup of coffee for you!

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  Thanks for jumping into the conversation about predatory open access publishing. Good to have you around! Blue Rasberry (talk) 14:27, 29 April 2019 (UTC)Reply

Facto Post – Issue 23 – 30 April 2019

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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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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)Reply

Facto Post – Issue 24 – 17 May 2019

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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.
To subscribe to Facto Post go to Wikipedia:Facto Post mailing list. For the ways to unsubscribe, see the footer.
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.

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

Your draft article, Draft:Applied Hydroecology

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Hello, Metacladistics. It has been over six months since you last edited the Articles for Creation submission or Draft page you started, "Applied Hydroecology".

In accordance with our policy that Wikipedia is not for the indefinite hosting of material deemed unsuitable for the encyclopedia mainspace, the draft has been nominated for deletion. If you plan on working on it further, or editing it to address the issues raised if it was declined, simply edit the submission and remove the {{db-afc}}, {{db-draft}}, or {{db-g13}} code.

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Thanks for your submission to Wikipedia, and happy editing. CASSIOPEIA(talk) 08:47, 6 July 2019 (UTC)Reply

ArbCom 2019 election voter message

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Speedy deletion nomination of Cross-Currents: East Asian History and Culture Review

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A tag has been placed on Cross-Currents: East Asian History and Culture Review requesting that it be speedily deleted from Wikipedia. This has been done under section G12 of the criteria for speedy deletion, because the page appears to be an unambiguous copyright infringement. This page appears to be a direct copy from https://cross-currents.berkeley.edu/about. For legal reasons, we cannot accept copyrighted text or images taken from other web sites or printed material, and as a consequence, your addition will most likely be deleted. You may use external websites or other printed material as a source of information, but not as a source of sentences. This part is crucial: say it in your own words. Wikipedia takes copyright violations very seriously and persistent violators will be blocked from editing.

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Cambridge meetup 14 December

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There is a page at m:Meetup/Cambridge/42. It would be interesting to chat. Charles Matthews (talk) 20:10, 29 November 2019 (UTC)Reply

AfC notification: Draft:Bulletin of the Geological Society of Finland has a new comment

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I've left a comment on your Articles for Creation submission, which can be viewed at Draft:Bulletin of the Geological Society of Finland. Thanks! Robert McClenon (talk) 06:36, 30 December 2019 (UTC)Reply

Autopatrolled flag

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Hi, given the quality of your article creations, I have added the WP:Autopatrolled flag to your user rights. Some people rather not have it (don't ask me why, I don't understand that), if that's the case for you, too, I can easily undo that :-) (In that case, ping me, as I am not putting your talk page on my watchlist). Happy editing! --Randykitty (talk) 15:31, 13 February 2020 (UTC)Reply

Your submission at Articles for creation: Bulletin of the Geological Society of Finland (journal) has been accepted

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Bulletin of the Geological Society of Finland (journal), which you submitted to Articles for creation, has been created.
The article has been assessed as Stub-Class, which is recorded on the article's talk page. You may like to take a look at the grading scheme to see how you can improve the article.

You are more than welcome to continue making quality contributions to Wikipedia. If your account is more than four days old and you have made at least 10 edits you can create articles yourself without posting a request. However, you may continue submitting work to Articles for Creation if you prefer.

Thank you for helping improve Wikipedia!

Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 09:25, 16 February 2020 (UTC)Reply

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Fusion

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Hello, how are you? I want to ask you if you can merge merge these two articles since they deal with the same topic of the recent invasion. --190.219.223.224 (talk) 21:29, 17 December 2023 (UTC)Reply