User talk:Alex Cohn

Welcome to Wikidata, Alex Cohn!

Wikidata is a free knowledge base that you can edit! It can be read and edited by humans and machines alike and you can go to any item page now and add to this ever-growing database!

Need some help getting started? Here are some pages you can familiarize yourself with:

• Introduction – An introduction to the project.
• Wikidata tours – Interactive tutorials to show you how Wikidata works.
• Community portal – The portal for community members.
• User options – including the 'Babel' extension, to set your language preferences.
• Contents – The main help page for editing and using the site.
• Project chat – Discussions about the project.
• Tools – A collection of user-developed tools to allow for easier completion of some tasks.

Please remember to sign your messages on talk pages by typing four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically insert your username and the date.

If you have any questions, don't hesitate to ask on Project chat. If you want to try out editing, you can use the sandbox to try. Once again, welcome, and I hope you quickly feel comfortable here, and become an active editor for Wikidata.

Best regards! Liuxinyu970226 (talk) 02:59, 11 January 2017 (UTC)

Gaetano Salvemini“ Q3757114

Hi! You added a death date, since that was added in it.WP by some IP. However, it has been removed by some different IP. But it is still here.

Now what? Dead or alive? --Wurgl (talk) 16:33, 26 February 2020 (UTC)

I just reverted my edit and removed date of death (P570) from Gaetano Salvemini (Q3757114) - we can always add it back if necessary. Nice catch—thanks! --Alex Cohn (talk) 17:33, 26 February 2020 (UTC)

Reverting is okay. But I wonder if there is at least a minimum of quality control in that process of a) some bot creates a list "recently died people" and b) some user creates items based on that list. A minimum like a bot which creates a list item xyz is found in wikidata, but not in any wikipedia or but "got removed". "Be first, but first be right." was some slogan of the founder of Reuters.

Or look at the history of „Paul-Max Walther“ (Q103752). Some user adds a item "Deutsche Biographie ID" to some football player (born 1987). Then another user comes along, maybe because another bot generated list: Hey, there is that item "Deutsche Biographie ID", but no item for the death date and adds the death date 1644. Time travel? Reverse living? Argh!

Sure, this here is the wrong place to discuss such problems, however having said this, I feel a little bit better. --Wurgl (talk) 07:31, 27 February 2020 (UTC)

q12720302

Your ID entries ISNI and VIAF seem to be wrong (different person}.

@Coagulans: Wow, nice catch. Thank you very much! I'm trying to figure out what specifically went wrong with my process here. Jeanne Cherry doesn't have an item, and IIRC I was working down a list of authors in WD without a VIAF listed and searching by name for them at VIAF, which doesn't seem like it could have caused this error. It looks like the LOC and VIAF have picked it up too, which makes me feel really bad. I'll look at my edits around then and try to see what was going on... Alex Cohn (talk) 02:17, 21 July 2020 (UTC)

Mix n match question

Hi. I saw that you added MnM catalog with 127k items: https://mix-n-match.toolforge.org/#/catalog/5041 recently. Is there any way to bypass the 1k items limit at a time or did you upload 127 files for that? :) Solidest (talk) 11:52, 28 May 2022 (UTC)

I used the "Import or Update Catalog" feature in MnM. I only had to upload one file. Alex Cohn (talk) 14:12, 30 May 2022 (UTC)

Dates of death

Hi, I'm curious what tool are you using for adding dates of death to items? Looks very effective. Samoasambia ✎ 08:04, 30 September 2024 (UTC)

I'm using pltools/recentdeaths, which in turn uses Wikidata:Database reports/Deaths at Wikipedia, a weekly report on articles in, e.g., the "2024 deaths" category whose corresponding Wikidata item doesn't have date of death (P570) set. Let me know if you have any more questions! Alex Cohn (talk) 08:31, 30 September 2024 (UTC)

Thanks, that looks very useful! Samoasambia ✎ 13:32, 30 September 2024 (UTC)