Hello, Vojtech.dostal! Welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. You may benefit from following some of the links below, which will help you get the most out of Wikipedia. If you have any questions you can ask me on my talk page, or place {{helpme}} on your talk page and ask your question there. Please remember to sign your name on talk pages by clicking or by typing four tildes "~~~~"; this will automatically produce your name and the date. If you are already loving Wikipedia you might want to consider being "adopted" by a more experienced editor or joining a WikiProject to collaborate with others in creating and improving articles of your interest. Click here for a directory of all the WikiProjects. Finally, please do your best to always fill in the edit summary field. Happy editing! LittleOldMe (talk) 15:22, 25 March 2008 (UTC)Reply
Getting Started
Getting Help
Policies and Guidelines

The Community
Things to do
Miscellaneous

Eukaryote cladogram

edit

I recommend expanding s.l. to sensu lato. Narayanese (talk) 16:22, 15 August 2008 (UTC)Reply

Mmh, I realised that it looks better with Archaeplastida, doesn't it? It is imho the same thing as Plantae sensu lato. --Vojtech.dostal (talk) 18:30, 15 August 2008 (UTC)Reply
True. Narayanese (talk) 22:53, 15 August 2008 (UTC)Reply

plastome

edit

Hi I'm not sure if the language tag you added to plastome is correct. Not knowing czech I'm a little but stuck, could you check it please? Smartse (talk) 16:01, 13 March 2009 (UTC)Reply

I suppose the language tag is right. The Czech article deals with the same topic, that is, the DNA inside plastids. If I were you, I would also redirect pages such as plastid DNA, chloroplast DNA, pDNA and cpDNA to the "plastome" article. I would also consider moving the page "plastome" to some more common name, such as "plastid DNA", as it is in Czech.--Vojtech.dostal (talk) 18:16, 13 March 2009 (UTC)Reply

Czech university project

edit

Hi! I'd be happy to talk with you; I should be available for much of the US daytime today, tomorrow and Wednesday of this week. Stop by #wikipedia-en-ambassadors connect, where I can usually be found when I'm on IRC (as "ragesoss").--Sage Ross - Online Facilitator, Wikimedia Foundation (talk) 12:53, 8 August 2011 (UTC)Reply

thanks. i'll try to catch you there --Vojtech.dostal (talk) 13:06, 8 August 2011 (UTC)Reply

EduWiki Conference 5-6 September in Leicester, UK

edit

I am writing to you as you have signed up to the Education Meetup at Wikimania 2012 and perhaps are interested in how Wikipedia links to education. Wikimedia UK is now running a education related event that may be of interest to you: the EduWiki Conference on 5-6 September in Leicester. This event will be looking at Wikipedia and related charitable projects in terms of educational practice, including good faith collaboration, open review, and global participation. It's a chance to talk about innovative work in your institution or online community, and shape the future of Wikimedia UK's work in this area!

The conference will be of interest to educators, scholarly societies members, contributors to Wikipedia and other open education projects, and students.

For details please visit the UK Chapter Wiki.

Please feel welcome to register or promote within your network.

Thank you, Daria Cybulska (talk) 16:23, 25 July 2012 (UTC)Reply

Your free 1-year HighBeam Research account is approved!

edit

Good news! You are approved for access to 80 million articles in 6500 publications through HighBeam Research.

  • The 1-year, free period begins when you enter the code you were emailed. If you did not receive a code, email wikiocaasi@yahoo.com your Wikipedia username.
  • To activate your account: 1) Go to http://www.highbeam.com/prof1
  • If you need assistance, email or ask User:Ocaasi. Please, per HighBeam's request, do not call the toll-free number for assistance with registration.
  • A quick reminder about using the account: 1) try it out; 2) provide original citation information, in addition to linking to a HighBeam article; 3) avoid bare links to non-free HighBeam pages; 4) note "(subscription required)" in the citation, where appropriate. Examples are at WP:HighBeam/Citations.
  • HighBeam would love to hear feedback at WP:HighBeam/Experiences
  • Show off your HighBeam access by placing {{User:Ocaasi/highbeam_userbox}} on your userpage
  • When the 1-year period is up, check applications page to see if renewal is possible. We hope it will be.

Thanks for helping make Wikipedia better. Enjoy your research! Cheers, Ocaasi 15:35, 30 August 2012 (UTC)Reply

edit

Hi. Thank you for your recent edits. Wikipedia appreciates your help. We noticed though that when you edited Inguinal lymph node, you added a link pointing to the disambiguation page GFP (check to confirm | fix with Dab solver). Such links are almost always unintended, since a disambiguation page is merely a list of "Did you mean..." article titles. Read the FAQ  Join us at the DPL WikiProject.

It's OK to remove this message. Also, to stop receiving these messages, follow these opt-out instructions. Thanks, DPL bot (talk) 11:23, 5 January 2013 (UTC)Reply

Welcome to The Wikipedia Adventure!

edit
Hi! We're so happy you wanted to play to learn, as a friendly and fun way to get into our community and mission. I think these links might be helpful to you as you get started.
-- 19:54, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

Welcome to The Wikipedia Adventure!

edit
Hi! We're so happy you wanted to play to learn, as a friendly and fun way to get into our community and mission. I think these links might be helpful to you as you get started.
-- 19:54, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

Books and Bytes: The Wikipedia Library Newsletter

edit
Books and Bytes

Volume 1, Issue 1, October 2013

by The Interior (talk · contribs), Ocaasi (talk · contribs)

Greetings Wikipedia Library members! Welcome to the inaugural edition of Books and Bytes, TWL’s monthly newsletter. We're sending you the first edition of this opt-in newsletter, because you signed up, or applied for a free research account: HighBeam, Credo, Questia, JSTOR, or Cochrane. To receive future updates of Books and Bytes, please add your name to the subscriber's list. There's lots of news this month for the Wikipedia Library, including new accounts, upcoming events, and new ways to get involved...

New positions: Sign up to be a Wikipedia Visiting Scholar, or a Volunteer Wikipedia Librarian

Wikipedia Loves Libraries: Off to a roaring start this fall in the United States: 29 events are planned or have been hosted.

New subscription donations: Cochrane round 2; HighBeam round 8; Questia round 4... Can we partner with NY Times and Lexis-Nexis??

New ideas: OCLC innovations in the works; VisualEditor Reference Dialog Workshop; a photo contest idea emerges

News from the library world: Wikipedian joins the National Archives full time; the Getty Museum releases 4,500 images; CERN goes CC-BY

Announcing WikiProject Open: WikiProject Open kicked off in October, with several brainstorming and co-working sessions

New ways to get involved: Visiting scholar requirements; subject guides; room for library expansion and exploration

Read the full newsletter


Thanks for reading! All future newsletters will be opt-in only. Have an item for the next issue? Leave a note for the editor on the Suggestions page. --The Interior 21:42, 27 October 2013 (UTC)Reply

The Wikipedia Library Survey

edit

As a subscriber to one of The Wikipedia Library's programs, we'd like to hear your thoughts about future donations and project activities in this brief survey. Thanks and cheers, Ocaasi t | c 15:47, 9 December 2013 (UTC)Reply

Translations ready for integration

edit

We have a bunch more articles ready for integration in Czech as seen here. Instructions on how to add them are here. Wondering if you could help? Let me know if there are difficulties. Thanks. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 20:34, 11 January 2014 (UTC)Reply

Medical Translation Newsletter Aug./Sept. 2014

edit

Medical Translation Newsletter
Issue 2, Aug./Sept. 2014
by CFCF

sign up for monthly delivery

Feature – Ebola articles

edit
Electron micrograph of an Ebola virus virion

During August we have translated Disease and it is now live in more than 60 different languages! To help us focus on African languages Rubric has donated a large number of articles in languages we haven't previously reached–so a shout out them, and Ian Henderson from Rubric who's joined us here at Wikipedia. We're very happy for our continued collaboration with both Rubric and Translators without Borders!

Just some of our over 60 translations:
New roles and guides!

At Wikimania there were so many enthusiastic people jumping at the chance to help out the Medical Translation Project, but unfortunately not all of them knew how to get started. That is why we've been spending considerable time writing and improving guides! They are finally live, and you can find them at our home-page!

New sign up page!

We're proud to announce a new sign up page at WP:MTSIGNUP! The old page was getting cluttered and didn't allow you to speficy a role. The new page should be easier to sign up to, and easier to navigate so that we can reach you when you're needed!

Style guides for translations

Translations are of both full articles and shorter articles continues. The process where short articles are chosen for translation hasn't been fully transparent. In the coming months we hope to have a first guide, so that anyone who writes medical or health articles knows how to get their articles to a standard where they can be translated! That's why we're currently working on medical good lede criteria! The idea is to have a similar peer review process to good article nominations, but only for ledes.

Some more stats
Further reading


-- CFCF 🍌 (email) 13:09, 24 September 2014 (UTC)Reply

A cup of coffee for you!

edit
Thanks forcommenting on the translations of English language health content to Czech language. Very often there is no community of Wikipedians to give feedback to translators and I am glad that you would try to get comments. Blue Rasberry (talk) 15:36, 12 November 2014 (UTC)Reply

Hi Vojtěch. Could you please unenrol me. --Hydronium Hydroxide (talk) 11:15, 3 September 2015 (UTC)Reply

Done, no prob :). The course is still running BTW Vojtěch Dostál (talk) 18:16, 3 September 2015 (UTC)Reply

ArbCom elections are now open!

edit

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) 13:47, 24 November 2015 (UTC)Reply

The Signpost: 06 January 2016

edit

The Signpost: 13 January 2016

edit
  • Op-ed: Transparency
    James Heilman talks about why he was removed from the WMF board.
  • Technology report: Tech news in brief
    Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community.

The Signpost: 20 January 2016

edit

The Signpost: 27 January 2016

edit

The Signpost: 03 February 2016

edit
  • From the editors: Help wanted
    Help us continue to publish on a weekly (-ish) basis.
  • Traffic report: Bowled
    Some sort of sporting contest tops this week's traffic.

The Signpost: 10 February 2016

edit

The Signpost: 17 February 2016

edit
  • Traffic report: Super Bowling
    The biggest annual event in America takes over Wikipedia viewership

The Signpost: 24 February 2016

edit

The Signpost: 02 March 2016

edit
  • Traffic report: Brawling
    Politics and wrestling top the traffic statistics.

The Signpost: 09 March 2016

edit

The Signpost: 16 March 2016

edit

The Signpost: 23 March 2016

edit

The Signpost: 1 April 2016

edit

The Signpost: 14 April 2016

edit
  • Gallery: A history lesson
    A look at political satire, brought to you by Wikipedia and Commons

The Signpost: 24 April 2016

edit

The Signpost: 2 May 2016

edit
  • Traffic report: Purple
    Prince's death breaks traffic report records
edit

Hi. Thank you for your recent edits. Wikipedia appreciates your help. We noticed though that when you edited KIAA0196, you added a link pointing to the disambiguation page Vesicle. Such links are almost always unintended, since a disambiguation page is merely a list of "Did you mean..." article titles. Read the FAQ  Join us at the DPL WikiProject.

It's OK to remove this message. Also, to stop receiving these messages, follow these opt-out instructions. Thanks, DPL bot (talk) 09:56, 11 May 2016 (UTC)Reply

The Signpost: 17 May 2016

edit

The Signpost: 28 May 2016

edit
  • Op-ed: Journey of a Wikipedian
    Mental health carries a powerful stigma. The more we are open about it, the less that weighs all of us down

The Signpost: 05 June 2016

edit
  • WikiProject report: WikiProject Video Games
    We sat down with the writers of some of the most vistied Wikipedia articles

The Signpost: 15 June 2016

edit
  • Blog: Why I proofread poetry at Wikisource
    Poetry: “it is the stuff of the soul; it speaks to the body, the mind, and the spirit alike.” Sonja Bohm worked for years to get all of Florence Earle Coates’ poetry online, and now proofreads poetry on the English Wikisource, the free library. We asked why.

The Signpost: 04 July 2016

edit

The Signpost: 21 July 2016

edit

The Signpost: 04 August 2016

edit
  • Featured content: Women and Hawaii
    Eight articles, two lists and fourteen pictures were promoted

The Signpost: 18 August 2016

edit
  • Traffic report: Olympic views
    Politics gives way to sports, TV and film
  • Arbitration report: The Michael Hardy case
    New case opened, and a reminder to administrators not to impose blocks based on private information

The Signpost: 06 September 2016

edit

The Signpost: 29 September 2016

edit

The Signpost: 14 October 2016

edit
  • News and notes: Fundraising, flora and fauna
    Wikimedia Foundation reports on fundraising challenges and new initiatives; Indian botanists rally to build Wikimedia Commons' photo collection
  • Traffic report: Debates and escapes
    Donald Trump remains a view-magnet, others change their channel

The Signpost: 4 November 2016

edit
  • Wikicup: WikiCup winners
    Winners of the tenth annual WikiCup competition announced and profiled
  • Featured content: Cream of the crop
    Fourteen articles, six lists and fourteen pictures were promoted

ArbCom Elections 2016: Voting now open!

edit

Hello, Vojtěch Dostál. 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.

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 2016 election, please review the candidates' statements and submit your choices on the voting page. MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 22:08, 21 November 2016 (UTC)Reply

The Signpost: 4 November 2016

edit
  • Featured content: Featured mix
    Eight articles, two lists and nine pictures were promoted

The Signpost: 22 December 2016

edit
  • Year in review: Looking back on 2016
    Roundup of the year's news from the Wikimedia world, featuring Wikipedia's 15th anniversary and organizational disarray at the Wikimedia Foundation
  • Special report: German ArbCom implodes
    The German Wikipedia's Arbitration Committee loses more than half its members amid political feud
  • Featured content: The Christmas edition
    Twenty-three articles, ten lists and twenty-one pictures were promoted

The Signpost: 17 January 2017

edit
  • Technology report: Tech present, past, and future
    Data sets now available on Commons, wishes to be worked on in 2017, and a recap of the Wikimedia Developer Summit

The Signpost: 6 February 2017

edit
  • WikiProject report: For the birds!
    Our second interview with the productive WikiProject Birds crew
  • Traffic report: Cool It Now
    Three weeks of the most popular Wikipedia articles

The Signpost: 27 February 2017

edit
  • Gallery: A Met montage
    A selection of CC0 images from the Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Signpost: 9 June 2017

edit
  • News and notes: Global Elections
    WMF Board election results, and FDC elections begin
  • Technology report: Tech news catch-up
    Bots, scripts, tools, and changes from February to June 2017

The Signpost: 23 June 2017

edit
  • Op-ed: Facto Post: a fresh take
    Exploring sourcing issues in Wikimedia projects, a solution in Wikidata and fact mining, and a newsletter to continue the conversation.

The Signpost: 15 July 2017

edit
  • Gallery: A mix of patterns
    An interesting mix of patterns and colors to brighten your day...
  • Humour: The Infobox Game
    Enjoy the Parameters: The Infobox Game can be enjoyed by everyone, not just those interested in water buffalo breeds, volcanic hotspots or the mysterious heteroisoform, and some day just might spawn an important facet of the financial derivatives industry.
  • Wikicup: 2017 WikiCup round 3 wrap-up
    The heat turns up on the 32 contestants who entered round three: 13 featured articles, 82 good articles, 167 DYKs, but we had to pick just eight of them to advance.

The Signpost: 5 August 2017

edit
  • WikiProject report: Comic relief
    An interview with a project that is centered around comics.
  • Featured content: Everywhere in the lead
    Recently promoted articles, lists and pictures – with a very heavy one in the mix
  • Technology report: Introducing TechCom
    The Architecture Committee adopts a new charter and name; and the latest in script, bot, and tech news
  • Humour: WWASOHs and ETCSSs
    An elite squad of highly insightful editors can lead the way for other editors who may need to retrain their faces into forming a smile.

The Signpost: 6 September 2017

edit
  • WikiProject report: WikiProject YouTube
    WikiProject YouTube is a new project on both English and Simple English Wikipedia.
  • Technology report: Latest tech news
    Syntax highlighting, failed login notifications, watchlist filters, and more.
  • Humour: Bots
    They do the things you don't want to do (and sometimes things you don't want done).

The Signpost: 25 September 2017

edit
  • News and notes: Chapter updates; ACTRIAL
    News from Wikimedia France, Wikimedia Macedonia, and Wikimedia Israel's; Autoconfirmed article creation trial begins
  • Humour: Chickenz
    The best that poultry has to offer
  • Gallery: Chicken mania
    Complimenting this issue's Humour about chickens...
  • Featured content: Flying high
    Newly featured birds, planes, and high achievers

Facto Post – Issue 5 – 17 October 2017

edit
Facto Post – Issue 5 – 17 October 2017

Editorial: Annotations

edit

Annotation is nothing new. The glossators of medieval Europe annotated between the lines, or in the margins of legal manuscripts of texts going back to Roman times, and created a new discipline. In the form of web annotation, the idea is back, with texts being marked up inline, or with a stand-off system. Where could it lead?

1495 print version of the Digesta of Justinian, with the annotations of the glossator Accursius from the 13th century

ContentMine operates in the field of text and data mining (TDM), where annotation, simply put, can add value to mined text. It now sees annotation as a possible advance in semi-automation, the use of human judgement assisted by bot editing, which now plays a large part in Wikidata tools. While a human judgement call of yes/no, on the addition of a statement to Wikidata, is usually taken as decisive, it need not be. The human assent may be passed into an annotation system, and stored: this idea is standard on Wikisource, for example, where text is considered "validated" only when two different accounts have stated that the proof-reading is correct. A typical application would be to require more than one person to agree that what is said in the reference translates correctly into the formal Wikidata statement. Rejections are also potentially useful to record, for machine learning.

As a contribution to data integrity on Wikidata, annotation has much to offer. Some "hard cases" on importing data are much more difficult than average. There are for example biographical puzzles: whether person A in one context is really identical with person B, of the same name, in another context. In science, clinical medicine requires special attention to sourcing (WP:MEDRS), and is challenging in terms of connecting findings with the methodology employed. Currently decisions in areas such as these, on Wikipedia and Wikidata, are often made ad hoc. In particular there may be no audit trail for those who want to check what is decided.

Annotations are subject to a World Wide Web Consortium standard, and behind the terminology constitute a simple JSON data structure. What WikiFactMine proposes to do with them is to implement the MEDRS guideline, as a formal algorithm, on bibliographical and methodological data. The structure will integrate with those inputs the human decisions on the interpretation of scientific papers that underlie claims on Wikidata. What is added to Wikidata will therefore be supported by a transparent and rigorous system that documents decisions.

An example of the possible future scope of annotation, for medical content, is in the first link below. That sort of detailed abstract of a publication can be a target for TDM, adds great value, and could be presented in machine-readable form. You are invited to discuss the detailed proposal on Wikidata, via its talk page.

edit

Charles Matthews (talk) 09:22, 17 October 2017 (UTC)Reply

The Signpost: 23 October 2017

edit

Facto Post – Issue 6 – 15 November 2017

edit
Facto Post – Issue 6 – 15 November 2017

WikidataCon Berlin 28–9 October 2017

edit
WikidataCon 2017 group photo

Under the heading rerum causas cognescere, the first ever Wikidata conference got under way in the Tagesspiegel building with two keynotes, One was on YAGO, about how a knowledge base conceived ten years ago if you assume automatic compilation from Wikipedia. The other was from manager Lydia Pintscher, on the "state of the data". Interesting rumours flourished: the mix'n'match tool and its 600+ datasets, mostly in digital humanities, to be taken off the hands of its author Magnus Manske by the WMF; a Wikibase incubator site is on its way. Announcements came in talks: structured data on Wikimedia Commons is scheduled to make substantive progress by 2019. The lexeme development on Wikidata is now not expected to make the Wiktionary sites redundant, but may facilitate automated compilation of dictionaries.

WD-FIST explained

And so it went, with five strands of talks and workshops, through to 11 pm on Saturday. Wikidata applies to GLAM work via metadata. It may be used in education, raises issues such as author disambiguation, and lends itself to different types of graphical display and reuse. Many millions of SPARQL queries are run on the site every day. Over the summer a large open science bibliography has come into existence there.

Wikidata's fifth birthday party on the Sunday brought matters to a close. See a dozen and more reports by other hands.

edit
Editor Charles Matthews. Please leave feedback for him.

If you wish to receive no further issues of Facto Post, please remove your name from our mailing list. Alternatively, to opt out of all massmessage mailings, you may add Category:Wikipedians who opt out of message delivery to your user talk page.
Newsletter delivered by MediaWiki message delivery

MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 10:02, 15 November 2017 (UTC)Reply

The Signpost: 24 November 2017

edit
  • News and notes: Cons, cons, cons
    The first ever Wikidata conference was a con we wanted. Problematic paid editing while in a position of trust: not so much.
  • Traffic report: Strange and inappropriate
    Readers intrigued by the Netflix show Stranger Things, and by sexual assault allegations.
  • Featured content: We will remember them
    War memorials, soldiers, extinct species, and devastating hurricanes are some of the most recently promoted featured content.

ArbCom 2017 election voter message

edit

Hello, Vojtěch Dostál. 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.

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 2017 election, please review the candidates and submit your choices on the voting page. MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 18:42, 3 December 2017 (UTC)Reply

Facto Post – Issue 7 – 15 December 2017

edit
Facto Post – Issue 7 – 15 December 2017

A new bibliographical landscape

edit

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
edit

To subscribe to Facto Post go to Wikipedia:Facto Post mailing list. For the ways to unsubscribe, see below.
Editor Charles Matthews, for ContentMine. Please leave feedback for him. Back numbers are here.
Reminder: WikiFactMine pages on Wikidata are at WD:WFM.

If you wish to receive no further issues of Facto Post, please remove your name from our mailing list. Alternatively, to opt out of all massmessage mailings, you may add Category:Wikipedians who opt out of message delivery to your user talk page.
Newsletter delivered by MediaWiki message delivery

MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 14:54, 15 December 2017 (UTC)Reply

The Signpost: 18 December 2017

edit
  • Arbitration report: Last case of 2017: Mister Wiki editors
    Evidence phase in Mister Wiki editors case is complete; the community is proposing remedies and the Arbitration committee is slated to make a decision by end of year. Meanwhile, voting has closed on 2017 elections.
  • Gallery: Wiki loving
    Winners of the international photo competitions Wiki Loves Earth and Wiki Loves Monuments.

Facto Post – Issue 8 – 15 January 2018

edit
Facto Post – Issue 8 – 15 January 2018

Metadata on the March

edit

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.

edit

To subscribe to Facto Post go to Wikipedia:Facto Post mailing list. For the ways to unsubscribe, see below.
Editor Charles Matthews, for ContentMine. Please leave feedback for him. Back numbers are here.
Reminder: WikiFactMine pages on Wikidata are at WD:WFM.

If you wish to receive no further issues of Facto Post, please remove your name from our mailing list. Alternatively, to opt out of all massmessage mailings, you may add Category:Wikipedians who opt out of message delivery to your user talk page.
Newsletter delivered by MediaWiki message delivery

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

The Signpost: 16 January 2018

edit
  • News and notes: Communication is key
    Two new WMF Communications department leadership appointments; a new way for Wikimedia communities to communicate their capacities.
  • Arbitration report: Mister Wiki is first arbitration committee decision of 2018
    In deciding to de-sysop an admin for efforts to evade discussion and review of paid edits made on behalf of a PR firm, Arbitration Committee doesn't significantly change the rules around paid editing, and leaves it up to the community whether to apply special restrictions to administrators.

The Signpost: 5 February 2018

edit

Facto Post – Issue 9 – 5 February 2018

edit
Facto Post – Issue 9 – 5 February 2018

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

Wikidata as Hub

edit

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.

edit

To subscribe to Facto Post go to Wikipedia:Facto Post mailing list. For the ways to unsubscribe, see below.
Editor Charles Matthews, for ContentMine. Please leave feedback for him. Back numbers are here.
Reminder: WikiFactMine pages on Wikidata are at WD:WFM.

If you wish to receive no further issues of Facto Post, please remove your name from our mailing list. Alternatively, to opt out of all massmessage mailings, you may add Category:Wikipedians who opt out of message delivery to your user talk page.
Newsletter delivered by MediaWiki message delivery

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

The Signpost: 20 February 2018

edit

Facto Post – Issue 10 – 12 March 2018

edit
Facto Post – Issue 10 – 12 March 2018

Milestone for mix'n'match

edit

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!

edit
3D printing

To subscribe to Facto Post go to Wikipedia:Facto Post mailing list. For the ways to unsubscribe, see below.
Editor Charles Matthews, for ContentMine. Please leave feedback for him. Back numbers are here.
Reminder: WikiFactMine pages on Wikidata are at WD:WFM.

If you wish to receive no further issues of Facto Post, please remove your name from our mailing list. Alternatively, to opt out of all massmessage mailings, you may add Category:Wikipedians who opt out of message delivery to your user talk page.
Newsletter delivered by MediaWiki message delivery

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

Signpost issue 4 – 29 March 2018

edit

Facto Post – Issue 11 – 9 April 2018

edit
Facto Post – Issue 11 – 9 April 2018

The 100 Skins of the Onion

edit

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.

edit

To subscribe to Facto Post go to Wikipedia:Facto Post mailing list. For the ways to unsubscribe, see below.
Editor Charles Matthews, for ContentMine. Please leave feedback for him. Back numbers are here.
Reminder: WikiFactMine pages on Wikidata are at WD:WFM.

If you wish to receive no further issues of Facto Post, please remove your name from our mailing list. Alternatively, to opt out of all massmessage mailings, you may add Category:Wikipedians who opt out of message delivery to your user talk page.
Newsletter delivered by MediaWiki message delivery

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

The Signpost: 26 April 2018

edit
  • From the editors: The Signpost's presses roll again
    Following Kudpung's op-ed "Death knell sounding for The Signpost?" in the 29 March issue, user comments encouraged a burst of enthusiasm to keep the newspaper in print.
  • Signpost: Future directions for The Signpost
    How to revive and evolve The Signpost? Big blue-sky proposals and small concrete proposals from the community and from two regular Signpost contributors.
  • In focus: Admin reports board under criticism
    A recent Community Health Initiative survey found only 27% of respondents are happy with the way reports of conflicts between Editors are handled on the Administrators' Incident Noticeboard (ANI).
  • Special report: ACTRIAL results adopted by landslide
    New major editing policy starting immediately: creation of articles in mainspace is to be limited to users with confirmed accounts
  • Op-ed: World War II Myth-making and Wikipedia
    Wikipedia's myth of the clean Wehrmacht and what you can do about it. Or, how not to be one of "the worst distributors of pro-Nazi perspectives and the Wehrmacht myth".
  • Discussion report: The future of portals
    What should we do about Portals? Keep them, delete them, or mark them as historical? Or should they be more closely connected with their WikiProject(s)?

The Signpost: 24 May 2018

edit
  • WikiProject report: WikiProject Portals
    After a recent Village Pump discussion, the Signpost looks at WikiProject Portals.
  • News and notes: Lots of Wikimedia
    De-recognition of Brazil user groups; brute-force attack on Wikipedia; Wikimedia Conference 2018; and assorted other silly things.
  • Gallery: Wine not?
    May 25 is National Wine Day in the United States.

Facto Post – Issue 12 – 28 May 2018

edit
Facto Post – Issue 12 – 28 May 2018

ScienceSource funded

edit

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.

edit
OpenRefine logo, courtesy of Google

To subscribe to Facto Post go to Wikipedia:Facto Post mailing list. For the ways to unsubscribe, see below.
Editor Charles Matthews, for ContentMine. Please leave feedback for him. Back numbers are here.
Reminder: WikiFactMine pages on Wikidata are at WD:WFM. ScienceSource pages will be announced there, and in this mass message.

If you wish to receive no further issues of Facto Post, please remove your name from our mailing list. Alternatively, to opt out of all massmessage mailings, you may add Category:Wikipedians who opt out of message delivery to your user talk page.
Newsletter delivered by MediaWiki message delivery

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

Facto Post – Issue 13 – 29 May 2018

edit
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
Links

If you wish to receive no further issues of Facto Post, please remove your name from our mailing list. Alternatively, to opt out of all massmessage mailings, you may add Category:Wikipedians who opt out of message delivery to your user talk page.
Newsletter delivered by MediaWiki message delivery

MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 18:19, 29 June 2018 (UTC)Reply

The Signpost: 29 June 2018

edit
  • News and notes: Money, milestones, and Wikimania
    Major grants announced, a new milestone for Afrikaans Wikipedia, a new WMF technical engagement team, an effort to start up a new library, two new admins – or maybe three fewer depending on your math.
  • Discussion report: Deletion, page moves, and an update to the main page
    Community discussions include style updates to project-wide icons and the main page, procedural questions on royal names and jettisoning unsuitable drafts, and deeper questions of compliance with European privacy laws and the perennial issue of shrinking admin corps.
  • Traffic report: Endgame
    Two celebrities hang themselves, and the FIFA World Cup is underway

Facto Post – Issue 14 – 21 July 2018

edit
Facto Post – Issue 14 – 21 July 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.

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
Links

If you wish to receive no further issues of Facto Post, please remove your name from our mailing list. Alternatively, to opt out of all massmessage mailings, you may add Category:Wikipedians who opt out of message delivery to your user talk page.
Newsletter delivered by MediaWiki message delivery

MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 06:10, 21 July 2018 (UTC)Reply

The Signpost: 31 July 2018

edit
  • From the editor: If only if
    Ships and shoes – and if you don't like it here, just go away!

Facto Post – Issue 15 – 21 August 2018

edit
Facto Post – Issue 15 – 21 August 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.

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

If you wish to receive no further issues of Facto Post, please remove your name from our mailing list. Alternatively, to opt out of all massmessage mailings, you may add Category:Wikipedians who opt out of message delivery to your user talk page.
Newsletter delivered by MediaWiki message delivery

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

The Signpost: 30 August 2018

edit
  • Special report: Wikimania 2018
    "Bridging knowledge gaps, the ubuntu way forward".

Facto Post – Issue 16 – 30 September 2018

edit
Facto Post – Issue 16 – 30 September 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.

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

If you wish to receive no further issues of Facto Post, please remove your name from our mailing list. Alternatively, to opt out of all massmessage mailings, you may add Category:Wikipedians who opt out of message delivery to your user talk page.
Newsletter delivered by MediaWiki message delivery

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

The Signpost: 1 October 2018

edit
  • In the media: Knowledge under fire
    Can Wikipedians help save the world's knowledge and shine a light on current events?

The Signpost: 28 October 2018

edit
  • Technology report: Bots galore!
    Bots can do anything you want – well, almost.
  • Special report: NPP needs you
    WMF continues to stonewall development; NPP wishes again relegated to stocking fillers.
  • In focus: Alexa
    We are all writing for Amazon.

Facto Post – Issue 17 – 29 October 2018

edit
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
Links

If you wish to receive no further issues of Facto Post, please remove your name from our mailing list. Alternatively, to opt out of all massmessage mailings, you may add Category:Wikipedians who opt out of message delivery to your user talk page.
Newsletter delivered by MediaWiki message delivery

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

ArbCom 2018 election voter message

edit

Hello, Vojtěch Dostál. 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

edit
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.

If you wish to receive no further issues of Facto Post, please remove your name from our mailing list. Alternatively, to opt out of all massmessage mailings, you may add Category:Wikipedians who opt out of message delivery to your user talk page.
Newsletter delivered by MediaWiki message delivery

MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 11:20, 30 November 2018 (UTC)Reply

The Signpost: 1 December 2018

edit
  • Gallery: Intersections
    Biology or technology? Form follows function in nature and the constructed world.

The Signpost: 24 December 2018

edit
  • News and notes: Some wishes do come true
    NPP wins the wish list poll; Wikipedia editors will be able to work better at night; new WMF appointments and new arbitrators; and who wants to be an admin?
  • In the media: Political hijinks
    Wikipedia says 'ta' to British M.P. and 'buh-bye' to U.S. President's image vandals.
  • Discussion report: A new record low for RfA
    Plus: reliable sources, notability, and fallout from the self-blocking software changes.
  • WikiProject report: Articlegenesis
    Discovering how new and unregistered users make articles with the members of WikiProject Articles for Creation.
  • Blog: News from the WMF
    In and around the WMF and its projects from the WMF's web site.
  • Essay: Requests for medication
    When the desire to continue to have the privilege of editing Wikipedia overrides the body's innate desire to choke the living shit out of some bastard who really has it coming.

Facto Post – Issue 19 – 27 December 2018

edit
Facto Post – Issue 19 – 27 December 2018

The Editor is Charles Matthews, for ContentMine. Please leave feedback for him, on his User talk page.
To subscribe to Facto Post go to Wikipedia:Facto Post mailing list. For the ways to unsubscribe, see the footer.

Learning from Zotero

Zotero is free software for reference management by the Center for History and New Media: see Wikipedia:Citing sources with Zotero. It is also an active user community, and has broad-based language support.

Zotero logo

Besides the handiness of Zotero's warehousing of personal citation collections, the Zotero translator underlies the citoid service, at work behind the VisualEditor. Metadata from Wikidata can be imported into Zotero; and in the other direction the zotkat tool from the University of Mannheim allows Zotero bibliographies to be exported to Wikidata, by item creation. With an extra feature to add statements, that route could lead to much development of the focus list (P5008) tagging on Wikidata, by WikiProjects.

Zotero demo video

There is also a large-scale encyclopedic dimension here. The construction of Zotero translators is one facet of Web scraping that has a strong community and open source basis. In that it resembles the less formal mix'n'match import community, and growing networks around other approaches that can integrate datasets into Wikidata, such as the use of OpenRefine.

Looking ahead, the thirtieth birthday of the World Wide Web falls in 2019, and yet the ambition to make webpages routinely readable by machines can still seem an ever-retreating mirage. Wikidata should not only be helping Wikimedia integrate its projects, an ongoing process represented by Structured Data on Commons and lexemes. It should also be acting as a catalyst to bring scraping in from the cold, with institutional strengths as well as resourceful code.

Links

Diversitech, the latest ContentMine grant application to the Wikimedia Foundation, is in its community review stage until January 2.

If you wish to receive no further issues of Facto Post, please remove your name from our mailing list. Alternatively, to opt out of all massmessage mailings, you may add Category:Wikipedians who opt out of message delivery to your user talk page.
Newsletter delivered by MediaWiki message delivery

MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 19:08, 27 December 2018 (UTC)Reply

The Signpost: 31 January 2019

edit
  • Technology report: When broken is easily fixed
    Emergency server switch goes smoothly; technical glitches resolved; a new way to transfer files to Commons.
  • News from the WMF: News from WMF
    The world’s largest photo contest, a $1 million gift, Wikipedia’s birthday, WF appoints Valerie D'Costa.
  • Essay: How
    A narrative to get you oriented to how this place works, and to the key policies and guidelines.

Facto Post – Issue 20 – 31 January 2019

edit
Facto Post – Issue 20 – 31 January 2019

The Editor is Charles Matthews, for ContentMine. Please leave feedback for him, on his User talk page.
To subscribe to Facto Post go to Wikipedia:Facto Post mailing list. For the ways to unsubscribe, see the footer.

Everything flows (and certainly data does)

Recently Jimmy Wales has made the point that computer home assistants take much of their data from Wikipedia, one way or another. So as well as getting Spotify to play Frosty the Snowman for you, they may be able to answer the question "is the Pope Catholic?" Possibly by asking for disambiguation (Coptic?).

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

Headlines about data breaches are now familiar, but the unannounced circulation of information raises other issues. One of those is Gresham's law stated as "bad data drives out good". Wikipedia and now Wikidata have been criticised on related grounds: what if their content, unattributed, is taken to have a higher standing than Wikimedians themselves would grant it? See Wikiquote on a misattribution to Bismarck for the usual quip about "law and sausages", and why one shouldn't watch them in the making.

Wikipedia has now turned 18, so should act like as adult, as well as being treated like one. The Web itself turns 30 some time between March and November this year, per Tim Berners-Lee. If the Knowledge Graph by Google exemplifies Heraclitean Web technology gaining authority, contra GIGO, Wikimedians still have a role in its critique. But not just with the teenage skill of detecting phoniness.

There is more to beating Gresham than exposing the factoid and urban myth, where WP:V does do a great job. Placeholders must be detected, and working with Wikidata is a good way to understand how having one statement as data can blind us to replacing it by a more accurate one. An example that is important to open access is that, firstly, the term itself needs considerable unpacking, because just being able to read material online is a poor relation of "open"; and secondly, trying to get Creative Commons license information into Wikidata shows up issues with classes of license (such as CC-BY) standing for the actual license in major repositories. Detailed investigation shows that "everything flows" exacerbates the issue. But Wikidata can solve it.

Links

If you wish to receive no further issues of Facto Post, please remove your name from our mailing list. Alternatively, to opt out of all massmessage mailings, you may add Category:Wikipedians who opt out of message delivery to your user talk page.
Newsletter delivered by MediaWiki message delivery

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

Facto Post – Issue 21 – 28 February 2019

edit
Facto Post – Issue 21 – 28 February 2019

The Editor is Charles Matthews, for ContentMine. Please leave feedback for him, on his User talk page.
To subscribe to Facto Post go to Wikipedia:Facto Post mailing list. For the ways to unsubscribe, see the footer.

What is a systematic review?

Systematic reviews are basic building blocks of evidence-based medicine, surveys of existing literature devoted typically to a definite question that aim to bring out scientific conclusions. They are principled in a way Wikipedians can appreciate, taking a critical view of their sources.

PRISMA flow diagram for a systematic review

Ben Goldacre in 2014 wrote (link below) "[...] : the "information architecture" of evidence based medicine (if you can tolerate such a phrase) is a chaotic, ad hoc, poorly connected ecosystem of legacy projects. In some respects the whole show is still run on paper, like it's the 19th century." Is there a Wikidatan in the house? Wouldn't some machine-readable content that is structured data help?

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

Most likely it would, but the arcana of systematic reviews and how they add value would still need formal handling. The PRISMA standard dates from 2009, with an update started in 2018. The concerns there include the corpus of papers used: how selected and filtered? Now that Wikidata has a 20.9 million item bibliography, one can at least pose questions. Each systematic review is a tagging opportunity for a bibliography. Could that tagging be reproduced by a query, in principle? Can it even be second-guessed by a query (i.e. simulated by a protocol which translates into SPARQL)? Homing in on the arcana, do the inclusion and filtering criteria translate into metadata? At some level they must, but are these metadata explicitly expressed in the articles themselves? The answer to that is surely "no" at this point, but can TDM find them? Again "no", right now. Automatic identification doesn't just happen.

Actually these questions lack originality. It should be noted though that WP:MEDRS, the reliable sources guideline used here for health information, hinges on the assumption that the usefully systematic reviews of biomedical literature can be recognised. Its nutshell summary, normally the part of a guideline with the highest density of common sense, allows literature reviews in general validity, but WP:MEDASSESS qualifies that indication heavily. Process wonkery about systematic reviews definitely has merit.

Links

If you wish to receive no further issues of Facto Post, please remove your name from our mailing list. Alternatively, to opt out of all massmessage mailings, you may add Category:Wikipedians who opt out of message delivery to your user talk page.
Newsletter delivered by MediaWiki message delivery

MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 10:02, 28 February 2019 (UTC)Reply

The Signpost: 28 February 2019

edit
  • From the editors: Help wanted (still)
    This may be too wordy, verbose and loquacious – and possibly redundant – but as you know, it takes others to check our work, and if there were more people in the Newsroom, we'd be able to double check ourselves and produce a better product for our readership; if you think you are up to it, you are welcome to join us and even copyedit the Editor-in-Chief's article intros.
  • Discussion report: Talking about talk pages
    This month's major discussions include a WMF talk page consultation and a proposed current events noticeboard.
  • Featured content: Conquest, War, Famine, Death, and more!
    Horsemen of the apocalypse all represented in recently promoted content, alongside new life, pretty birds, great music, and other miscellaneous topics.
  • Traffic report: Binge-watching
    Netflix shows and TV sports dominate. A US politician breaks into the top 10.
  • Technology report: Tool labs casters-up
    Tool labs goes kaput, bots running wild (not really), interface administrators step into the breach, new gadgets and other tech happenings.
  • Gallery: Signed with pride
    A gallery of user signatures created by Wikipedians themselves.

Facto Post – Issue 22 – 28 March 2019

edit
Facto Post – Issue 22 – 28 March 2019

The Editor is Charles Matthews, for ContentMine. Please leave feedback for him, on his User talk page.
To subscribe to Facto Post go to Wikipedia:Facto Post mailing list. For the ways to unsubscribe, see the footer.

When in the cloud, do as the APIs do

Half a century ago, it was the era of the mainframe computer, with its air-conditioned room, twitching tape-drives, and appearance in the title of a spy novel Billion-Dollar Brain then made into a Hollywood film. Now we have the cloud, with server farms and the client–server model as quotidian: this text is being typed on a Chromebook.

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

The term Applications Programming Interface or API is 50 years old, and refers to a type of software library as well as the interface to its use. While a compiler is what you need to get high-level code executed by a mainframe, an API out in the cloud somewhere offers a chance to perform operations on a remote server. For example, the multifarious bots active on Wikipedia have owners who exploit the MediaWiki API.

APIs (called RESTful) that allow for the GET HTTP request are fundamental for what could colloquially be called "moving data around the Web"; from which Wikidata benefits 24/7. So the fact that the Wikidata SPARQL endpoint at query.wikidata.org has a RESTful API means that, in lay terms, Wikidata content can be GOT from it. The programming involved, besides the SPARQL language, could be in Python, younger by a few months than the Web.

Magic words, such as occur in fantasy stories, are wishful (rather than RESTful) solutions to gaining access. You may need to be a linguist to enter Ali Baba's cave or the western door of Moria (French in the case of "Open Sesame", in fact, and Sindarin being the respective languages). Talking to an API requires a bigger toolkit, which first means you have to recognise the tools in terms of what they can do. On the way to the wikt:impactful or polymathic modern handling of facts, one must perhaps take only tactful notice of tech's endemic problem with documentation, and absorb the insightful point that the code in APIs does articulate the customary procedures now in place on the cloud for getting information. As Owl explained to Winnie-the-Pooh, it tells you The Thing to Do.

Links

If you wish to receive no further issues of Facto Post, please remove your name from our mailing list. Alternatively, to opt out of all massmessage mailings, you may add Category:Wikipedians who opt out of message delivery to your user talk page.
Newsletter delivered by MediaWiki message delivery

MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 11:46, 28 March 2019 (UTC)Reply

The Signpost: 31 March 2019

edit

Facto Post – Issue 23 – 30 April 2019

edit
Facto Post – Issue 23 – 30 April 2019

The Editor is Charles Matthews, for ContentMine. Please leave feedback for him, on his User talk page.
To subscribe to Facto Post go to Wikipedia:Facto Post mailing list. For the ways to unsubscribe, see the footer.

Completely clouded?
Cloud computing logo

Talk of cloud computing draws a veil over hardware, but also, less obviously but more importantly, obscures such intellectual distinction as matters most in its use. Wikidata begins to allow tasks to be undertaken that were out of easy reach. The facility should not be taken as the real point.

Coming in from another angle, the "executive decision" is more glamorous; but the "administrative decision" should be admired for its command of facts. Think of the attitudes ad fontes, so prevalent here on Wikipedia as "can you give me a source for that?", and being prepared to deal with complicated analyses into specified subcases. Impatience expressed as a disdain for such pedantry is quite understandable, but neither dirty data nor false dichotomies are at all good to have around.

Issue 13 and Issue 21, respectively on WP:MEDRS and systematic reviews, talk about biomedical literature and computing tasks that would be of higher quality if they could be made more "administrative". For example, it is desirable that the decisions involved be consistent, explicable, and reproducible by non-experts from specified inputs.

What gets clouded out is not impossibly hard to understand. You do need to put together the insights of functional programming, which is a doctrinaire and purist but clearcut approach, with the practicality of office software. Loopless computation can be conceived of as a seamless forward march of spreadsheet columns, each determined by the content of previous ones. Very well: to do a backward audit, when now we are talking about Wikidata, we rely on integrity of data and its scrupulous sourcing: and clearcut case analyses. The MEDRS example forces attention on purge attempts such as Beall's list.

Links

If you wish to receive no further issues of Facto Post, please remove your name from our mailing list. Alternatively, to opt out of all massmessage mailings, you may add Category:Wikipedians who opt out of message delivery to your user talk page.
Newsletter delivered by MediaWiki message delivery

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

The Signpost: 30 April 2019

edit
  • News and notes: An Action Packed April
    New Administrators, April Fools, our competitors, and other associated updates

Facto Post – Issue 24 – 17 May 2019

edit
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.

Please be aware that this is a research project in development, and may have outages for planned maintenance. That will apply for the next few days, at least. The ScienceSource wiki main page carries information on practical matters. Email is not enabled on the wiki: use site mail here to Charles Matthews in case of difficulty, or if you need support. Further explanatory videos will be put into commons:Category:ContentMine videos.


If you wish to receive no further issues of Facto Post, please remove your name from our mailing list. Alternatively, to opt out of all massmessage mailings, you may add Category:Wikipedians who opt out of message delivery to your user talk page.
Newsletter delivered by MediaWiki message delivery

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

The Signpost: 31 May 2019

edit
  • From the editors: Picture that
    The North Face sneaks in advertisements, apologizes after being caught
  • Arbitration report: ArbCom forges ahead
    Resignations, new cases, administrator security, and more
  • Technology report: Lots of Bots
    Admin bots, approved bots, bots on trial, lots and lots of bots
  • Essay: Paid editing
    We've been talking about paid editing forever

The June 2019 Signpost is out!

edit
  • Technology report: Actors and Bots
    Database changes, new scripts, Tech News, and more.
  • Gallery: Unlike the North Face, Wiki Loves Earth
    Wikimedia photographers surge to contribute to the Wiki Loves Earth campaign even while rogue clothing company The North Face replaces wiki illustrations with advertisements.

The Signpost: 31 July 2019

edit

The Signpost: 30 August 2019

edit

The Signpost: 30 September 2019

edit
  • Special report: Post-Framgate wrapup
    Summary of actions around a formerly banned former administrator: Arbitration Committee action and withdrawn request for adminship

The Signpost: 31 October 2019

edit
  • Arbitration report: October actions
    An "unblockable" is blocked; a former arb resigns.

Translation

edit

Hi, can you translation from Czech?

Aybars İbak (article) Enes bi (talk) 14:35, 11 November 2019 (UTC)Reply

Hello, I am not interested in translations. --Vojtěch Dostál (talk) 17:08, 12 November 2019 (UTC)Reply

But, i can’t create any page. Please you do create. And I will edit Enes bi (talk) 18:16, 12 November 2019 (UTC)Reply

ArbCom 2019 election voter message

edit
Hello! Voting in the 2019 Arbitration Committee elections is now open until 23:59 on Monday, 2 December 2019. All eligible users are allowed 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 2019 election, please review the candidates and submit your choices on the voting page. If you no longer wish to receive these messages, you may add {{NoACEMM}} to your user talk page. MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 00:10, 19 November 2019 (UTC)Reply

The Signpost: 29 November 2019

edit
  • Essay: Adminitis
    Some humor about the otherwise serious subject of burnout.

The Signpost: 27 December 2019

edit
  • Discussion report: December discussions around the wiki
    Regarding integrity of information presented by Wikipedia, as well as the processes and people who ensure it remains trustworthy.

The Signpost: 27 January 2020

edit

The Signpost: 1 March 2020

edit

The Signpost: 29 March 2020

edit
  • Arbitration report: Unfinished business
    A new case, a case returns from limbo, and an RfC being prepared.

The Signpost: 26 April 2020

edit

The Signpost: 31 May 2020

edit

The Signpost: 28 June 2020

edit

The Signpost: 2 August 2020

edit

The Signpost: 30 August 2020

edit

The Signpost: 27 September 2020

edit
  • Featured content: Life finds a Way
    Animals, sports, military, and science feature heavily in this month's best content.

The Signpost: 27 September 2020

edit
  • Featured content: Life finds a Way
    Animals, sports, military, and science feature heavily in this month's best content.

The Signpost: 1 November 2020

edit

The Signpost: 29 November 2020

edit
  • Op-Ed: Re-righting Wikipedia
    Wikipedia deprecates more right-wing sources than left-wing sources ... but is it a problem?

The Signpost: 28 December 2020

edit
  • Traffic report: 2020 wraps up
    Punks and heroes, losers and winners, the bereaved and the deceased – they're all here.

The Signpost: 31 January 2021

edit

The Signpost: 28 February 2021

edit

The Signpost: 28 March 2021

edit
  • Obituary: Yoninah
    Barukh dayan ha-emet ("Blessed is the true judge.")

The Signpost: 25 April 2021

edit

The Signpost: 25 April 2021

edit

The Signpost: 25 April 2021

edit

The Signpost: 27 June 2021

edit
  • Obituary: SarahSV
    Requiescat in pace.

The Signpost: 25 July 2021

edit

The Signpost: 29 August 2021

edit

The Signpost: 26 September 2021

edit

The Signpost: 31 October 2021

edit
  • WikiProject report: Redirection
    An interview with participants at WikiProject Redirect.

The Signpost: 29 November 2021

edit
  • WikiCup report: The WikiCup 2021
    15th annual event closes with hundreds of articles improved
  • From a Wikipedia reader: What's Matt Amodio?
    Wikipedia democratizes knowledge, but is it in Jeopardy?
  • Arbitration report: ArbCom in 2021
    We should have at least one of these every year!

The Signpost: 28 December 2021

edit
  • From the editor: Here is the news
    And wishing our readers a healthy, fortunate and bountiful 2022.
  • Arbitration report: A new crew for '22
    Elections certified, bans unlifted, mailing lists restricted, but no new cases.
  • Humour: Buying Wikipedia
    Helpful how-to for the prospective buyer. Why settle for a measly single edit, when you can buy the whole thing?

The Signpost: 30 January 2022

edit
  • WikiProject report: The Forgotten Featured
    Interview with volunteers at the Unreviewed featured articles 2020 working group.

The Signpost: 27 February 2022

edit
  • WikiProject report: 10 years of tea
    Coffee in Teahouse and other secrets revealed in this interview with volunteers.

The Signpost: 27 March 2022

edit
  • Eyewitness Wikimedian, Vinnytsia, Ukraine: War diary
    Reporting from on the ground in Ukraine.
  • From the archives: Burn, baby burn
    A look at when early backups of Wikipedia were recovered.

The Signpost: 24 April 2022

edit
  • News and notes: Double trouble
    The second case of Wikipedian persecution.
  • Eyewitness Wikimedian, Vinnytsia, Ukraine: War diary (Part 2)
    "Our proud Sparta bleeds too."
  • Interview: On a war and a map
    How a war map predated Wikimedia's map of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

The Signpost: 29 May 2022

edit
  • Featured content: Featured content of April
    Showcasing the very best articles, pictures, videos, and other contributions from Wikipedians last month.
  • From the archives: The Onion and Wikipedia
    A look at when The Onion published an humorous article regarding Wikipedia.

The Signpost: 26 June 2022

edit

The Signpost: 1 August 2022

edit
  • Eyewitness Wikimedian, Vinnytsia, Ukraine: War diary (part 3)
    "This year's victory was sad and dull."
  • Opinion: Criminals among us
    Mass murderers, sex criminals, Ponzi schemers, insider traders, and business people.
  • Gallery: A backstage pass
    All the things about theatre that the general public misses out on.

The Signpost: 31 August 2022

edit
  • Discussion report: Boarding the Trustees
    2022 elections, new page patrol, Fox News, Vector 2022, Royal Central and external links
  • From the archives: 5, 10, and 15 years ago
    The Signpost looks back on The Signpost: New reports, conceived in a spirit of collaboration, and dedicated to the proposition of information and, uh, more information for all.

The Signpost: 30 September 2022

edit
  • Featured content: Farm-fresh content
    This month: A FACBot upgrade, a completed list of lists.

The Signpost: 31 October 2022

edit

The Signpost: 28 November 2022

edit
  • Disinformation report: Missed and Dissed
    Are government goons prowling our fair encyclopedia?
  • Book review: Writing the Revolution
    Heather Ford's new volume on Wikipedia, knowledge and power in the 2011 Egyptian revolution.
  • Technology report: Galactic dreams, encyclopedic reality
    Facebook's Galactica demo provides a case study in large language models for text generation at scale: this one was silly, but we cannot ignore them forever.
  • Obituary: A tribute to Michael Gäbler
    They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old: Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
  • CommonsComix: Joker's trick
    A toast to good health, a health to good hoax, a hoax to good toast.

The Signpost: 1 January 2023

edit
  • Featured content: Would you like to swing on a star?
    You head into the featured content report. Amongst the features you see astronauts, both Gilbert and Sullivan, Ursula K. Le Guin's incredibly talented mother, and Billboard charts. It is pitch black, you are likely to be eaten by a grue.
  • From the archives: Five, ten, and fifteen years ago
    Photographers, Sandy Hook, the shocking use of Nazi symbols in articles about Nazis, and "You wouldn't recognise a fact if it bit you in the ass".

The Signpost: 16 January 2023

edit
  • Featured content: Flip your lid
    ...and your ambigram. Also: Boring lava fields, birds of Tuvalu, and commelinid family names with etymologies.

The Signpost: 4 February 2023

edit

The Signpost: 20 February 2023

edit
  • Featured content: Eden, lost.
    But much else to be found.

The Signpost: 9 March 2023

edit

The Signpost: 20 March 2023

edit

The Signpost: 03 April 2023

edit

The Signpost: 26 April 2023

edit
  • Special report: Signpost statistics between years 2005 and 2022
    In this article, we will look at The Signpost statistics. More precisely: Signpost article statistics by year, TOP 20 titles of Signpost articles, TOP 20 article authors, and the home wikis of article authors.
  • News from the WMF: Collective planning with the Wikimedia Foundation
    First of a two part series summarising the priorities for the Wikimedia Foundation's next fiscal year (July 2022–June 2023) including staffing, budget and other changes, and how to provide your feedback.
  • Humour: The law of hats
    The Selfish Hatnote, the Disambiguation Singularity, and other information-theoretic conundra of encyclopedic note.

The Signpost: 8 May 2023

edit

The Signpost: 22 May 2023

edit
  • Traffic report: Coronation, chatbot, celebs
    Celebs and Bollywood film dominated reader interest, as usual, but with a new persistent presence on the lists of a certain AI.

The Signpost: 5 June 2023

edit
  • Featured content: Poetry under pressure
    Now is not this ridiculous, and is not this preposterous? A thorough-paced absurdity - explain it if you can.

The Signpost: 19 June 2023

edit

The Signpost: 3 July 2023

edit
  • Featured content: Incensed
    In which featured pictures have a pleasing orange/blue colour scheme for some reason.

The Signpost: 17 July 2023

edit

The Signpost: 1 August 2023

edit

The Signpost: 15 August 2023

edit
  • Cobwebs: Getting serious about writing
    The innards of the Signpost received a major overhaul in March/April 2019. Here's how we reduced behind-the-scenes busywork and improved writers resources.

The Signpost: 31 August 2023

edit
  • In the media: Taking it sleazy
    "Poli", which means "many", and "tics", which means "under-the-table Wikipedia article whitewashing campaigns".

The Signpost: 16 September 2023

edit
  • Featured content: Catching up
    Covering all of August. Pretty much.

The Signpost: 3 October 2023

edit
  • Featured content: By your logic,
    The first issue to feature two poetry article

The Signpost: 23 October 2023

edit

The Signpost: 6 November 2023

edit
  • Traffic report: Cricket jumpscare
    Plus Kollywood, Killers of the Flower Moon, and ongoing war.

The Signpost: 20 November 2023

edit

The Signpost: 4 December 2023

edit
  • Comix: Bold comics for a new age
    "I think we ought to read only the kind of comics that wound or stab us. If the comic we're reading doesn't wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for?" — Franz Kafka
  • Humour: Mandy Rice-Davies Applies
    This page in a nutshell: Whether or not someone has denied unsavory allegations — though such a denial may not merit being given equal weight in an article — a worthless shitpost should still be included.

The Signpost: 24 December 2023

edit
  • In the media: Consider the humble fork
    Forky on forky on forky, plus a strange donation scheme and other interesting bits of news.
  • Technology report: Dark mode is coming
    No more must Wikipedia always be a lightbulb in the dark — except metaphorically of course.
  • Crossword: when the crossword is sus
    The Signpost Crossword is a 2018 online multiplayer social deduction game that takes place in space-themed settings where players are colorful, armless cartoon astronauts.
  • BJAODN: Bad jokes and other deleted nonsense
    Edit summary: "Only need this page for about 30 minutes to demonstrate to a friend how easy it is to create a Wikipedia page. Then it will be deleted."

The Signpost: 10 January 2024

edit
  • News and notes: In other news ... see ya in court!
    Let the games begin! The 2024 WikiCup is off to a strong start. With copyright enforcement, AI training and freedom of expression, it's another typical week in the wiki-sphere!
  • WikiProject report: WikiProjects Israel and Palestine
    What are the editorial processes behind covering some of the most politically polarizing and contentious topics on English Wikipedia?

The Signpost: 31 January 2024

edit
  • Opinion: Until it happens to you
    A stream of consciousness about plagiarism on Wikipedia from the perspective of a user who directly witnessed it.
  • Comix: We've all got to start somewhere
    Writing a good subheading for a one-sentence joke is basically like writing an entire second joke so I'm not going to do it.

The Signpost: 13 February 2024

edit

The Signpost: 2 March 2024

edit

The Signpost: 29 March 2024

edit

The Signpost: 25 April 2024

edit

The Signpost: 16 May 2024

edit

The Signpost: 8 June 2024

edit

The Signpost: 4 July 2024

edit

The Signpost: 22 July 2024

edit

The Signpost: 14 August 2024

edit

The Signpost: 4 September 2024

edit

The Signpost: 26 September 2024

edit

The Signpost: 19 October 2024

edit

The Signpost: 6 November 2024

edit

The Signpost: 18 November 2024

edit

The Signpost: 12 December 2024

edit

The Signpost: 24 December 2024

edit

The Signpost: 15 January 2025

edit

The Signpost: 7 February 2025

edit

The Signpost: 27 February 2025

edit

The Signpost: 22 March 2025

edit

The Signpost: 9 April 2025

edit

The Signpost: 1 May 2025

edit

The Signpost: 14 May 2025

edit

The Signpost: 24 June 2025

edit

The Signpost: 18 July 2025

edit

The Signpost: 9 August 2025

edit

The Signpost: 9 September 2025

edit

The Signpost: 2 October 2025

edit

The Signpost: 20 October 2025

edit

The Signpost: 10 November 2025

edit

The Signpost: 1 December 2025

edit

The Signpost: 17 December 2025

edit

The Signpost: 15 January 2026

edit

The Signpost: 29 January 2026

edit

The Signpost: 17 February 2026

edit

The Signpost: 10 March 2026

edit

The Signpost: 31 March 2026

edit

The Signpost: 21 April 2026

edit

The Signpost: 22 May 2026

edit