Wikipedia

User:Pelagic/Journal

< User:Pelagic

Dear diary, ... no.

This is not a blog nor a general-purpose journal. It's just a list of wiki-related notes to myself in reverse chronological order. I'm hoping that using date-order will remove some barriers to recording things.

The predecessor of this page is at User:Pelagic/sandbox/j. I'm planning to move more recent subpages here.

December 2023 edit

edit · open

=== 2023-12-26 ===

Etchings by Queen Victoria edit

TIL that Victoria and Albert produced 80+ etchings from 1840 to 1844.

(Digitisations of) 14 items from the Royal Collection and Aberdeen Archives are in Commons. Other prints are in the British Museum, or at commercial auction. c:Category:Etchings by Victoria of the United Kingdom

Wikidata query for visual artworks by V.R. edit

Returns 16 results, mostly paintings with some etchings. 

SELECT DISTINCT ?item ?itemLabel ?img WHERE {
  SERVICE wikibase:label { bd:serviceParam wikibase:language "[AUTO_LANGUAGE]". }
  {
    SELECT DISTINCT ?item ?img WHERE {
      ?item p:P170 ?statement0.
      ?statement0 (ps:P170/(wdt:P279*)) wd:Q9439.
      ?item p:P31 ?statement1.
      ?statement1 (ps:P31/(wdt:P279*)) wd:Q4502142.
      OPTIONAL { ?item wdt:P18 ?img }
    }
    LIMIT 100
  }
}

B.M. held an exhibition of 20 items "displayed for the first time" in 2019.

Sotheby’s cites (Scott-Elliot, 1961) as a source. Noted at c:Category talk:Etchings by Victoria of the United Kingdom#Total number and date range of works by Victoria.

This line of enquiry all started because I stumbled on "Queen Victoria as an Etcher (Second paper – concludes)" by Christian Brinton, The Critic vol. 37 (Jul–Dec 1900), no. 1 (July) pp. 34– . https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=inu.32000000676892&view=1up&seq=50&size=200

Harewood edit

A volume held at Harewood House contains 75 prints with personal annotations by H.M. It was exhibited in 2017. https://harewood.org/about/blog/notes/collection-of-etchings-by-victoria-and-albert-go-on-public-display-for-the-first-time/

2023-12-27 edit

Victoria's and Albert's etchings cont. edit

 

One image I like is young Vicky held by her nurse. (Victoria, Princess Royal, with her nurse (Q124002522) We have File:Queen Victoria-Victoria, Princess Royal.jpg, which from the camera metadata appears to have been taken in-person by a visitor to the exhibition. V&A Museum catalog entry [1] has an image with different lighting and less heavy line weight. It's striking how much difference lighting and exposure can make to line art. Both bear the V.A.M. mark, so it's unquestionably the same artefact.

British Museum holds a copy, and Sotheby’s offered another for sale in 2020.

Another interesting image is the one that started me down this rabbit-hole. BM [2] calls it “A lady in Tudor costume”, with the curator's comment “Possibly a self-portrait of Queen Victoria”. In the Critic (1900) it is captioned as a self-portrait. I wonder if Victoria also used herself as a model for the Abbess.

Update: Earlier I went and snarfed c:File:Victoria, Princess Royal, with her nurse (1841). VAM E.2175-1932.jpg from V&A, and created a more B&W version of it. ⁓ Pelagic ( messages ) 11:32, 27 December 2023 (UTC)

2023-12-28 edit

Despite sources saying that A Lady in Tudor Costume is a self-portrait, compare [3], [4], [5] versus [6], [7].

October 2023 edit

edit · open

=== 2023-10-23 ===

user:Pelagic/Journal/2023/10/Tiny text in mobile site on iPad, moved to user:Pelagic/Problems/Tiny text in mobile site on iPad

December 2022 edit

edit · open

Saturday 24 Dec edit

Wow. it's been a year since I last made notes here. (12:16 Sat 24, AEDT)

Soft plastic recycling and REDcycle edit

We have articles on recycling in Australia, plastic recycling, microplastics and plastic pollution, but only a redirect for soft plastic; and nothing for REDcycle, soft plastic recycling, nor plastic recycling in Australia.

I just read about REDcycle suspending its operations [8] due to a slump in markets, and being hit by the EPA over not answering questions about its storage and stockpiling facilities [9]. See also [10]. Looking for a good place to add the information, or perhaps this is an area where we need more articles.

(12:16 Sat 24, AEDT)

Ocean warming and species distribution change edit

https://www.abc.net.au/news/rural/2022-08-13/fish-species-move-tasmania-snapper-kingfish/101327780. King George whiting, yellowtail kingfish, and "snapper" (red snapper?) are becoming more prevalent in Tasmania. (12:58 Sat 24, AEDT; 01:58 Sat 24, UTC)

The ducks are getting fat edit

When I visit https://thankyou.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thank_You/ I get a cookie like
centralnotice_hide_fundraising:"%7B%22v%22%3A1%2C%22created%22%3A1671847418%2C%22reason%22%3A%22donate%22%7D"
which decodes to "{"v":1,"created":1671847418,"reason":"donate"}" . It's probably too late to give advice at Teahouse about that. Maybe next year. (15:06 Sat 24, AEDT; 04:06 Sat 24, UTC)

A template for I've-already-donated could be something like:

Hi, (user), thankyou for donating to the Wikimedia Foundation. Part of your donation goes towards the software and infrastructure that run Wikipedia and its sister projects, as well as supporting services such as legal. Wikimedia doesn't track you across devices, so if you donate on one device you will still see fundraising banners on others. After you donated, you would have seen a page like https://thankyou.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thank_You/ That page sets a browser cookie which is meant to suppresses repeat banners (centralnotice_hide_fundraising:"{"v":1,"created"%...,"reason":"donate"}" ). If you block or clear cookies, then fundraising banners will reappear.

December 2021 edit

edit · open

Saturday 18 Dec edit

edit

Christmas is coming, the donation drive is back.
You have to put a penny in the Fou-undation's hat.
If you haven't got a penny then a ha'penny will do,
...?

I'm doing a cookie test while logged-out in a fresh temporary browser profile.

Initial load of main page sets:

  • .wikipedia.org
    • WMF-Last-Access-Global (content = (the date as a string), expiry = 1 month / 31 days, accessible to script = no)
    • GeoIP (domain = .wikipedia.org, path = /, secure same-site-only, content = AU:NSW:Sydney:-33.87:151.20:v4, expiry = session)
      • The loc is imprecise enough and Sydney has a large enough population that I don't mind disclosing that.
  • en.wikipedia.org
    • WMF-Last-Access (same settings as WMF-Last-Access-Global)
    • enwikiel-sessionId (30 days)
    • enwikimwuser-sessionId (session)
    • enwikiwmE-sessionTickLastTickTime (30 days)
    • enwikiwmE-sessionTickTickCount (30 days)

All cookies are same-site-only, with path = /

After I scroll down or navigate away to another page, I don't see an change in cookie state.

After I click Close on the second, red, banner, I get a 1-week cokie

  • .wikipedia.org
    • centralnotice_hide_fundraising (7 days)
  • en.wikipedia.org
    • centralnotice_hide_fundraising (7 days, Content = %7B%22v%22%3A1%2C%22created%22%3A1639777294%2C%22reason%22%3A%22close%22%7D = {"v":1,"created":1639777294,"reason":"close"} )
    • enwikiwmE-sessionTickLastTickTime (30 days)
    • enwikiwmE-sessionTickTickCount (30 days)



Christmas is coming, the donation drive is back.
You have to put a penny in the Fou-undation's hat.
If you haven't got a penny then donate another day,
But we're asking you humb-e-ly, "please don't scroll away".

— Pelagic


Christmas is coming, the donation drive is back.
You have to put a penny in the Fou-undation's hat.
If you haven't got a penny then a ha'penny will do,
And if you click "Close", we'll set cookie for you!

— Pelagic

More research edit

Aha, my suspicion was correct. The count for "Hi. This is the 3rd time we’ve interrupted your reading recently,..." is kept in LocalStorage:

val: {seenCount: 3, skippedThisCycle: 0, nextCycleStart: 1642371585845, seenThisCycle: 3}

(10:49 Sat 18, AEST)

edit

I wanted to do this last year, wen I was pissed-off about the wording of the banners, but didn't go through because it was a big job.

I'm surprised, I expected the proportion for a December archive to be higher. (14:13 Sat 18, AEST)

August 2021 edit

edit · open

Saturday 11 Dec edit

Saturday 21 Aug edit

Wikimania notes edit

Notes from last weekend's Wikimania.

Curated Commons edit

Prototype; slides, etherpad; blog post ...

Other resources: CC Search

Tuesday 10 Aug edit

Discord edit

I tried out Wikipedia:Discord on the weekend. Fine for a place to hang out, not sure if it's somewhere you'd send newbies. (06:16 Tue 10, AEST)

Sun 8 Aug edit

President of Hungary contacts ru:wp? [12] [13]

May–July 2021 edit

edit · open

Fri 30 Jul edit

Citations are the foundation of Wikipedia’s reliability: they trace the connection between content added by our community of volunteer contributors and its sources. For readers, citations provide a mechanism to validate and check for themselves that what Wikipedia says is sound and trustworthy: they act as a gateway towards a broader ecosystem of reliable knowledge. [Redi et al.]

Wikipedia relies on all kinds of sources, including sources whose access is restricted by a paywall. However, open access scientific sources are especially important. Since they do not require payment to access, they are immediately verifiable by a wider number of Wikipedia editors and readers.[1]

(03:29 Sat 31, AEST)

Wikipedia aims to be an open-access summary of all reliable knowledge—not a summary of only open-access knowledge.[2]

The article by Orlowitz & Stinson also has interesting info about fair-use newspaper clippings at Newspapers.com and Newspaperarchive.com. See also [3][4][5]

The world is cold and lonely and Wikipedia is this generation’s only popular friendly player in nonprofit media. [blueras, ibid.]

Lay public access is so great, so disrupting, and so completely outside the professional experience of scientists or the commercial experience of scholarly publishers that they would not even know how to respond to a public demand for this content. [blueras, ibid.]

Sun 27 Jun edit

 

Tue 22 Jun edit

My first mentee question edit

User talk:Pelagic#Question from I-U-She Thomas (14:56, 15 June 2021), User talk:I-U-She Thomas#Hello, and welcome

Project Ark (NZ) cataloguing standards edit

Sun 13 Jun edit

Mix n Match edit

Made my first catalogue – https://mix-n-match.toolforge.org/#/catalog/4533

The thing is: MnM only imports ID, Name, and Description, it doesn't scrape other properties from the source.

I can't for the life of me find how to get back to the scraper and edit it. (Note .*? is non-greedy match.)

  • Level 1: range 483592–483593
  • URL Pattern: https://www.neram.com.au/artwork-details/$1
  • Regex Block: <div class="ehive-item-metadata-wrap">(.*?)</div>
  • Regex Pattern: Name/Title</span><span class="ehive-field-value">(.*?)</span></p><p class="ehive-field ehive-identifier-primary_creator_maker"><span class="ehive-field-label">Maker</span><span class="ehive-field-value">(.*?)</span></p>(.*?)<p class="ehive-field ehive-identifier-date_made"><span class="ehive-field-label">Date Made</span><span class="ehive-field-value">(.*?)</span> * ID=$L1, Name=$1, Desc=$4 art work by $2

Tried making a Follow level that searches https://www.neram.com.au/search-nerams-collections?eHive_query=streeton for pattern https://www.neram.com.au/artwork-details/(\d+), and it only matched two hyperlinks in the test. Saved as https://mix-n-match.toolforge.org/#/catalog/4534.

Surprisingly, after letting it run, it reports 21 results! Seems like it didn't loop across the two results pages like I'd hoped, but it fetched everything from the first page. Unfortunately, in addition to the 12 real results, it also picked out the see-also links for other artists. The item links have wrong URL, I must have messed up my $1 and $2 (facepalm).

Prelimiary matching is understandably hit-and-miss, for example Cremorne matches the place. I wonder, had I set the scraper to make the items instances of visual artwork (Q4502142), would it have matched more? Two of the good matches are to items that I previously created by hand: Musgrave Street Wharf (Q104158527) and Summer Noon, Hawkesbury River (Q104155664).

 
NGV 2333-4
 
NGA 65.72

There's another danger here for the unwary. Streeton often made two versions of a painting: a smaller plein-air study and a larger studio version. The two usually end up in different museums, but if the data item doesn't have recent holding/owner info, then which one is it? E.g. Land of the golden fleece (Q20443273) and Land of the Golden Fleece (Q50736803).

 
Gloucester Buckets, 1894
 
The Gloucester Buckets (also known as Landscape: the AA Co's million acres), 1894

Then you have paintings with the same name, artist, and year, but very different views of the subject.

In Powershell, I can do 

$a = Invoke-WebRequest -UseBasicParsing -Uri 'https://www.neram.com.au/search-nerams-collections/?eHive_query=str
eeton&view=list&'
$a.Links| where { $_.href -like 'https://www.neram.com.au/artwork-details/*' } |select -Unique href
Artstor edit

https://library.artstor.org/public/26756284 compare Canal Scene, Venice (The Grand Canal) (Q105091689).

Mon 24 edit

Errant nonsense edit

Sun 23 edit

  • They're changing the default search on Commons [15]

(03:29 Mon 24, AEST)

Sat 22 edit

Don’t Scale edit

Do Things That Don’t Scale is about startups, but has some good quotable phrases. I wonder how some of the ideas can transfer to other situations.

  • You can be ornery when you're Scotty, but not when you're Kirk.
  • you'll find that delighting customers scales better than you expected
  • you can and should give users an insanely great experience with an early, incomplete, buggy product, if you make up the difference with attentiveness
Growth features edit

Thu 20 edit

  • Looking through recent newsletters.
  • Mediawiki has a definition for when "a proposed blocker [should] be considered as possibly changing the course of a software project": m:Wikimedia Product Guidance/Community involvement#Early feedback (by ELappen). Some other interesting views on deployment process there.
  • [[#Growth Newsletter #18 [17 May 2021] ]]

Wed 19 edit

Misc, open tabs edit

Sun 16 May edit

2039 rule edit
Edit summary GIF edit

c:File:Qxz-ad2.gif

Sat 1 May edit

Edit summaries and changeset comments edit

Open StreetMap's advice parallels our use of edit summaries. [16] (12:36 Sat 01, AEST) "Since April 21, 2009, users can attach Wikipedia-like edit summaries to their edits" [17] (14:20 Sat 01, AEST)

April 2021 edit

edit · open

Sun 18 April edit

Wikimedia themes for Firefox edit

(20:45 Sun 18, AEST)

March 2021 edit

edit · open

User:Pelagic/Journal/2021/03

February 2021 edit

edit · open

User:Pelagic/Journal/2021/02

January 2021 edit

edit · open

Sun 21 Mar edit

Parser cache edit

T267404 Add reply links to the parser cache

Sun 14 Mar edit

Pics and descriptions for link sharing edit

Thu 11 Mar edit

Mon 22 Feb edit

Found this last week, still need to try it out: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Jdlrobson/vector-max-width-toggle.js

Sun 21 Feb edit

Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Archive329#ANI reform proposal. Interesting conversation in context of UCoC Enforcement. Freeform vs structured, dysfuntional vs not broken, ... but note especially the mention of a band-gap between ANI and ArbCom. (08:21 Sun 21, AEST)

Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Desysop Policy (2021). This may actually get up.

Sun 7 edit

"Unfortunately, I don't have a good idea at the moment. Much depends on how events unfold. I did not breed this sizeable frog and I sincerely hope that it will not be me who will eventually swallow it, or kiss it, hoping it will turn into a lovely princess." March Man, [18]

Feb - Wed 3 edit

(todo move to new subpage)

https://thenewdaily.com.au/life/science/environment/2021/02/02/lord-howe-island/

Sunday 17 edit

[25] burr medic

Saturday 16 edit

“Of course at some point a user will make a mistake or lose their cool and say something out of order. Happens to all of us. The last thing we want is some hateful goblin sitting on our shoulder gleefully waiting for the moment when we slip up. Without the liberation to make mistakes now and again and be forgiven, we can't build the confidence we need to be bold and work in a dedicated fashion to make useful articles.” SilkTork 17:24, 6 January 2021 (UTC) [26]

Sunday 3 edit

"a large proportion of our CheckUser cases [on Wikidata] involve India" Jasper at d:Wikidata:Requests for permissions/CheckUser/1997kB

m:Wikimedia Wikimeet India 2021 looks interesting.

Saturday 2 edit

URL to list user uploads on Commons edit

https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:ListFiles/Pelagic (learned from Ssr, who has a userbox for it)

IP masking edit

Updates from recent months:

Friday 1 edit

Election taskforce edit

Morrison, Sara (2 November 2020). "How Wikipedia is preparing for Election Day". Vox. Article shows good understanding of Wikipedia's workings. Via SB and Signpost.

Gawker edit

So that's what happened to Gawker? Sued by Hulk Hogan and others backed by some billionaire Peter Thiel? Bought by Univision in 20116 to form Gizmodo Group, which has now been resold.

Stelter, Brian; Kludt, Tom (2 November 2016). "Gawker and Hulk Hogan settle lawsuit: 'The saga is over'". CNNMoney.

December 2020 edit

edit · open

Tuesday 15 edit

I've been quiet for a while, reading but not posting. Apart from some Wikidata work on Arthur Streeton and related art items, was avoiding Wikimedia.

App for KaiOS edit

mw:Talk:Wikipedia for KaiOS#Congrats and questions

November 2020 edit

edit · open

Fri 27 edit

Thu 26 edit

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(technical)#Announcing_xCite:_Templates_eXported_from_Wikipedia

Monday 23 Nov edit

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Asian_Gallery_New_South_Wales_Art_Gallery&oldid=725862170 versus https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Art_Gallery_of_New_South_Wales&oldid=754117551#Asian_Art_Gallery_expansion

https://thenewdaily.com.au/news/national/2020/11/23/platypus-bushfire-impact-threatened-species/

Not-so simple, onion weed edit

I thought finding an identification for the locally-common and well-known "onion weed" would be a simple web search away. Yates and Flower Power say Nothoscordum inodorum [27][28], Lawn Solutions says Nothoscordum sp. [29] So far, so good. Tas., Vic, and NSW dept's of Primary Industries have Asphodelus fistulosus, which appears to be a completely different plant going by the same common name. [30][31]

However, our article N. indorum was moved to N. borbonicum then changed into a redirect to Neapolitan garlic: history. The pictures of Allium neapolitanum flower heads and leaves look unlike the onion weed I know (except this one, which is probably mis-classified).

Our article Nothoscordum × borbonicum looks more like it.

Google image search for "onion weed" gives a variety of results: Allium neapolitanum, nodding flowers of Allium triquetrum (esp. NZ sites like [32]), the star-like Asphodelus fistulosus, Guildford grass Romulea rosea, "dune onion weed" Trachyandra divaricata Trachyandra divaricata (Q15605895) /Anthericum divaricatum [33][34][35]

For what it's worth, I have a couple of photos to upload, though some existing ones by John Tann and Harry Rose are better.

Good pics from commons:

  •  
    flower (side)
  •  
    flowers
  •  
    seed pod
  •  
    seeds

My two:

  •  
    umbels at different stages
  •  
    umbels top view

Various species of "onion weed":

  •  
    A. neapolitanum
  •  
    N. borbonicum / gracile categorised as A. neapolitanum
  •  
    N. gracile?
  •  
    N. gracile
  •  
    A. triquetrum
  •  
    Asph. fistulosus
  •  
    Asph. fistulosus
  •  
    R. rosea (ZA)
  •  
    R. rosea (AU)
  •  
    R. rosea fruit

Description of N. borbonicum Kunth (Latin) [36]. Flora of Australia says "N. inodorum has also been misapplied to this species [in Australia]" [37]. Illustration (as Allium inodorum), plate 1129 in Curtis' botanical magazine, no. 28 (credit "F. Sangsom sculp. Syd Edwards Del") [38].

"Examination of the holotype (BM) of Allium inodorum Aiton (1789), basionym of Nothoscordum inodorum (Aiton) Nicholson, reveals this as conspecific with Allium neapolitanum Cyrillo (1788) and not a member of the genus Nothoscordum Kunth (Alliaceae). The correct name for the widely naturalized weedy species known as N. inodorum or as N. fragrans (Vent.) Kunth is N. gracile (Aiton) Stearn, syn. Allium gracile Aiton (1789). The current misapplication of the epithet inodorum goes back to an illustrated article by Ker-Gawler in Curtis's Botanical Magazine 28: t. 1129 (1808) where N. gracile is depicted as A. inodorum; his later (1810) correction has been overlooked or ignored." Stearn 1986 [39] (paywall, JStor available via Wikipedia Library).

So is it borbonicum or gracile? Nothoscordum says that gracile is widely naturalised, but doesn't make the same note about borboicum. But the photos at Nothoscordum gracile (Q15524066) look different.

J.K. Small, Addisonia 13: t. 433 (1928), as Nothoscordum fragrans [40]

N. gracile WCSPIPNI; N. &mult; gracile [41].

Saturday 21 Nov edit

Friday 20 edit

Shame d:Wikidata:Property proposal/detail of painting didn’t get up, it could have been useful for SDC. Though if one file is a crop of the other, then file extracted from (P7009) file. What might be needed is a property that combines file ⟨digital representation of detail from⟩ Q-item. Could a qualifier like "subject has role = detail" do the job?

Similarly, for books, you would have images for separate pages, so file ⟨digital representation of part of⟩ Q-item for manifestation. "digital representation of (P6243) item (applies to part (P518) page n)" doesn’t work, because applies to part requires an item not string. How about "digital representation of (P6243) item (page(s) (P304) page n)"? Is that an abuse of P304?

The difference I see is that general "part of" could be a well-defined subpart, like "page n" or "excluding frame" or "central panel of triptych", then it’s a conceptual 'thing'; but "detail of" a 2D work is an arbitrary rectangular region.

Monday 16 edit

(Actually after midnight, but I’ll count it as still Monday. 01:08 Tue 17, AEST)
(Continued Tuesday morning ... and Friday)

Paintings and photographs edit

ABC Landline showed an article on Arthur Streeton, coinciding with the current Streeton exhibition at AGNSW. Falling down the rabbit-hole of art works on Wikidata and Commons has left me with more questions than answers.

Wikiprojects edit
Materials and support edit

Current Wikidata practice is to use two made from material (P186) statements, one with qualifier applies to part (P518) = painting support (Q861259). In contrast, Commons appears to have specific templates for common combinations, like c:Template:Oil on canvas, c:Template:Oil on canvas panel or c:Template:Oil on panel.

But what about something like Tom Roberts' drawing of Streeton (commons), where the material is catalogued as "charcoal on off-white laid paper on thin cream card"? [42] If paper is the drawing surface, then what qualifier can be used for the card? Similarly how would you distinguish stretched canvas vs. canvas-on-board?

support (Q1058733) is "point in a structure at which loads are transferred between structural elements" or "vertical structural element" and is a subclass of Point. Sheesh! Don’t we have any item for the more general concept of "supporting structure"? Then we have support (Q33123524) "material to which media is applied to create an image" which is more like painting support (Q861259) than physical support.

And it's not just about materials: the source gives dimensions of both the paper and the card.

Framed and unframed dimensions edit

I created items framed (Q101698846) and unframed (Q101698787) for use with applies to part. Afterwards I found Wikidata talk:WikiProject sum of all paintings/Archive/2015#Size of a painting.

...

Nearly a week later, found discussion of framed and unframed dimensions at d:Wikidata talk:WikiProject sum of all paintings/Archive/2019#Format. Dimensions of framed work may be already expressed as (outer) dimensions of the frame. (05:39 Fri 20, AEST)

IIIF edit

I used relative position within image (P2677) for a textual description "lower left", but seems that it’s intended for IIIF coordinates only.

Genre, movement, and painting style edit

...

Collection, institution and location edit

...

Other edit

Sat 14 Nov edit

Happy Diwali everyone!

c:commons:Glamorous

October 2020 edit

edit · open


Friday 30 edit

Sunday 25 edit

Attack helicopter edit

Looks like an interesting short story by Isabel Fall, but has been cancelled. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Sexually_Identify_as_an_Attack_Helicopter http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/fall_01_20/ (stumbled on via WLDC).

AFC, drafts, and G13 edit

Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Articles for creation#Are we an incubator?

WikiLoop DoubleCheck edit

Somehow the interface changed for me between yesterday and today. Either they’ve done an update or I bumped into an A/B test. Old version was better.

Using it for a short time yesterday, when I could still see the ORES percentages, it seemed that 50–60% "damaging" were still very likely to be good. Still not sure about the 60–80% range.

I noticed a number of changes that were good-content, bad-presentation. None of the choices "looks good", "not sure", and "should revert" really fit. I’d want to have a judgement like "constructive contribution, but could be better / needs improvement".

Monday 12 edit

WikiCite addon for Zotero edit

This looks promising: meta:Wikicite/grant/WikiCite addon for Zotero with citation graph support.

Tuesday 6 edit

This user in a nutshell - brilliant!

The herbarium of Banks and Solander edit

For the earliest account of the plants of these Islands we are indebted to two of the most illustrious botanists of their age, and to the voyages of the greatest of modern navigators ; for the first, and to this day the finest and best illustrated herbarium that has ever been made in the islands by individual exertions is that of Sir Joseph Banks and Dr. Solander, during Captain Cook's first voyage in 1769. Upwards of 360 species of plants were collected during the five months that were devoted to the exploration of these coasts, at various points between the Bay of Islands and Otago, including the shores of Cook's Straits ; and the results are admirable, whether we consider the excellence of the specimens, the judgment with which they were selected, the artistic drawings by which they are illustrated, and above all the accurate MS. descriptions and observations that accompany them. That the latter, which include a complete Flora of New Zealand as far as then known, systematically arranged, illustrated by two hundred copper-plate engravings, and all ready for the press, should have been withheld from publication by its illustrious authors, is (considering the circumstances under which it was prepared) a national loss, and to science a grievous one, since, had it been otherwise, the botany of New Zealand would have been better known fifty years ago than it now is*.

* This herbarium and MS. form part of the Banksian collection, and are deposited in the British Museum. I feel that I cannot over-estimate the benefit which I have derived from these materials, and it is much to be regretted that they were not duly consulted by my predecessors. The names by which Dr. Solander designated the species have been in most cases replaced by others, often applied with far less judgment, and his descriptions have never been surpassed for fulness, terseness, and accuracy. The total number of drawings of New Zealand plants is about 212, of which 176 are engraved on copper, but the engravings have never been published; these treasures are accompanied with 24 additional copper-plates from Forster's drawings, of plants which were not found during Cook's first voyage.

Hooker, J.D. (1852), The botany of the Antarctic voyage of H.M. discovery ships Erebus and Terror. II. Flora Novae-Zelandiae . Pp. ii–iii in Chapter I, Introductory Essay. https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/item/54141#page/13/mode/1up

“Among our collection are 56 Australian plant specimens collected by Joseph Banks and Daniel Solander in 1770. These specimens were originally held in the British Museum of Natural History, which is now the National History Museum in London.” Banks specimens in the Australian National Herbarium

“Te Papa has a duplicate set of more than 500 specimens collected by Joseph Banks and Daniel Solander during Captain Cook’s first expedition to New Zealand in 1769-1770.  Collections Online has images of most of them.” Topic: Banks and Solander specimens Mus.NZ (te papa tongarewa).

Australian Virtual Herbarium search for Banks, J returns 2294 hits across multiple AU and NZ herbaria.

Monday 5 edit

Commons:File:Asteracea poster 3.jpg

Friday 2 edit

Hedley Australian marine regions edit

Hedley proposed a subdivision of the Australian coastline, as regards the marine fauna, into four regions; these have been generally accepted by scientific investigators, ... Hedley 's Regions are as follows : the Solanderian covered the coastline of Eastern Australia from Cape York to Moreton Bay ; the Dampierian Region ran westward from Cape York to Shark's Bay, Western Australia; the Adelaidean Region extended along the south and south-west coasts of Australia from Wilson's Promontory, in Victoria, to Shark's Bay, and included the north and west coasts of Tasmania; the Peronian Region took in the rest of the east coast of Australia and Tasmania, and the east coast of Victoria. The only emendations yet pro- posed have been the separation of the eastern coast of Tasmania under the name Maugean, and the acceptance of the Solanderian as inclusive of the Dam- pierian. I have continually compared Peronian shells with the (same) species from southern Tasmania, and commonly find them to differ to a greater or less degree. At the point of inosculation of Regions, species of the two Regions will commonly be met with, but the further away from this point the purer the collection. Thus, to emphasise this point, Sydney should show almost a pure Peronian fauna, while Adelaide would show just as pure an Adelaidean fauna, but collections made at Twofold Bay or Western Port might show an appreciable Adelaidean or Peronian element respectively. At Twofold Bay no Solanderian forms would be expected, and these hypotheses have been absolutely confirmed by facts. We can now with certitude generally designate the littoral marine mollusca with their Regional names.

Iredale, (1924) p.180 in "Results from Bell's molluscan collections." Proc.Lin.Soc.NSW 49(19):179–278

(20:28 Fri 02, AEST)

Oysters again edit

Ibid. p. 191–192

Ostrea sinuata Lamarck is the name for the shell recently known as O. angasii from Australia. The Neozelanic species known by the latter name seems to be a distinct species. The status of O. virescens Angas I have not yet decided.

(54) Ostrea cucullata Born, 1778 [Saccostrea cucullata].

This species was described from the Mus. Caes. Vindob. without locality, but, when figured in the later work, the locality was given as West Indies and the Isle of Ascension and is still included in lists of these faunas. As there appear to be two forms in New South Wales, the name may be totally rejected. On the sheltered shores and with the mangrove associations is a form named by Gould glomerata [Saccostrea glomerata] : this appears to range further south, and Roy Bell sent it from Tellaburga Island, off the Victorian corner, which seems to be an addition to the Victorian fauna. The other form, which lives on the ocean reefs extending as far south as Long Reef, near Sydney, and which Bell collected at Lord Howe Island, may bear the name of mordax Gould [Saccostrea mordax?]. These names were proposed by Gould (Proc. Bost. Soc. Nat. Hist., iii., Dec, 1850, p. 346) for shells from New Zealand and the Feejee Islands respectively, and may later have to give way to some earlier name, as Solander appears to have collected specimens when here with Captain Cook, probably at Cooktown. Thus, in the Sale Catalogue of the Portland Museum, appears the entry on p. 139, etc., "Ostrea purpurea S. from New Holland, very rare."

The name O. purpurea falls as an absolute synonym of Born's O. cucullata as Born's figures (Tab. 6, f. 11-12) were cited as illustrative of Solander's species.

Drupa, Morula, (Tenguella), etc. edit

Ibid. pp. 274–275

  • 988 Drupa chaidea → Morula nodulifera
  • 989 Drupa marginalba → Morula marginalba
    • When I collected the shell known as Drupa chaidea Duclos at the Kermadec Islands, its close resemblance to the Australian shell impressed me, and I worked out the affinities of these shells from conchological characters, and accepted Morula for the chiaidea series. ... Cooke pointed out that the radula was "markedly that of Morula. Cronia is a scarcely modified Morula" thus absolutely confirming my conclusions achieved from conchological studies.
    • "In the Proc. Malac. Soc. Lond., xiii., 1918, pp. 38-39, I noted that Duclos' P. chaidea was regarded by Martens, from study of the type, as identical with P. nodulifera Menke. This was briefly described (Verz. Conch. Samml. Malsburg, p. 33 (pref. May 18) 1829) without definite locality, but as the species is unmistakable, Menke's name may be accepted."
  • At the same time, I recorded that Purpura granulata Duclos (Ann. Sci. Nat. Paris, xxvi., May, 1832) was equivalent to and earlier than P. tuberculata Blainville (after June, 1832), and this chronological item was overlooked by Hedley (These Proc, xlviii., 3 Oct., 1923, p. 314) when he gave a definite Australian locality for Drupa tuberculata, recte Morula granulata Duclos, a common shell at Lord Howe and Norfolk Islands, whence Bell sent it.

Thursday 1 edit

Mix n Match edit

Was doing a little Wikidata Mix'n'Match on NSW Flora ID [44] last month. That led to working on underground orchid Rhizanthella speciosa, and heaths Rupicola, Budawangia, Epacris gnidioides, etc. here on Wikipedia.

Lord Howe Island edit

File:Lord Howe Silvereye.jpg struck me yesterday, for its subtly colourful plumage.

"Observations on the vegetation of Lord Howe Island" (Maiden, 1898) mentions some non-botanical observations that could fit into the history section of our LHI article.

Proc. Lin. Soc. N. S. W. edit

Is a mess on Wikidata. [45] IA (e.g. at vol 23) says vol's 1-10 were called series 1, vol's 11–20 series 2, then series numbers were abandoned for 21–present (vol 147 and counting). See BHL for volume list.

Proceedings of the Linnean Society of New South Wales (Q6087096) is labelled series 1, but it’s really about the whole Journal to present. Proceedings of the Linnean Society of New South Wales (Q6087098) has sitelinks for es and ast. A lot of the identifiers are duplicates but need to be checked. Spanish Wikipedia links only to IPNI (dupe) and Tropicos (...).

The links between IA and OpenLibrary appear to be imperfect. For example, volume 1 on IA proceedingsoflin0101linn links to OL7210197M (good), and OL241358W (which has a thumbnail that says "second series volume VII" and on-page identifier OL13500590M), which in turn links back to proceedingsoflin0207linn. Perhaps OL chooses the volume first linked to the work record as representative of the work?

Hathi trust has [46] Google scans, nothing after vol. 24. [47] shows the current volume, there are search features but link to purchase issues only returns 20 volumes to choose from.

Transparency versus big bang edit

“On the one hand, ... the editorial community has developed a hugely successful process of open collaboration, based on incremental improvements. On the other hand, paid staff in any large organization achieve professional outcomes through hiding their incremental improvements in favor of a final product.”
— John Vandenburg, quoted in "The WMF's age of discontent", The Signpost, 2016-01-06. [48]

September 2020 edit

edit · open

Fri 25 edit

Sun 20 edit

D:Wikidata:Project chat/Archive/2018/08#Allowing editors to add edit summaries and phab:T47224

day in year for periodic occurrence (P837) supports both date forms like "May 19" and "first Sunday in October". The trick is that each recurring date has its own Q-item! – May 19 (Q2578), first Sunday in October (Q51156449).

Old-old tabs edit

(Sing it to the tune of Red-Red Wine? Tabs from laptop.)

Sat 19 edit

d:Wikidata:Project chat/Archive/2018/08#The future of bibliographic data in Wikidata: 4 possible federation scenarios (2018) and wikidata:WikiCite/Roadmap

Fatcat on human names [49]

d:Wikidata:Project chat/Archive/2018/08#What heart rate does your name have?

Thu 17 edit

Ultra-black fish revisited edit

No hits for the DOI in OpenCitations index search or corpus search, nor in Crossref. Not surprising, Elsevier seems to hoard its citations for Scopus rather than adding to Crossref. [citation needed, but I did read yesterday somewhere that Elsevier is/was holding out on submitting reference lists]. But they do show a Crossmark button, so they are probably submitting the bibliographic listing if not the references.

Title search (but not DOI) on Datacite [51] does work. However the results pages don’t render properly and are unusable on iPad, so I’ll need to revisit from a desktop or laptop computer. One hit links out to supporting data (xlsx) [52] (DOI 10.17632/6t6sw3mpy3.1) on Mendeley (another Elsevier company?).

It would be fascinating to analyse how articles like this gain popular traction.

The reference list here [53] is interesting in that it presents authors / title / journal on separate lines. Takes up more space, but improves readability. [to-do: check markup for linked data]

Slingshot spiders edit

ScienceDirect recommended this one: "Ultrafast launch of slingshot spiders using conical silk webs" (available online 17 Aug, query not yet in print?) [54] Another title that could fire the popular imagination. (It says "ultra"!) So far has 1 blog mention, 10 news mentions, 13 shares/likes/comments, 213 tweets, and 0 Wikipedia citations.

Old tabs edit

Personal names edit

Names are diverse and databases that assume (first-name, last-name) pairs are really not sufficient. Some interesting discussion is at d:Wikidata:Property proposal/Archive/45#name, d:Wikidata:Property proposal/Archive/45#marrried name. See also d:Wikidata:WikiProject Names.

Tue 15 edit

Open Citations and Crossref edit

  • Citations as First-Class Data Entities: Introduction. OpenCitations Blog, 2018. Shotton. [55]
  • Heibi, Peroni, Shotton. Software review: COCI, the OpenCitations Index of Crossref open DOI-to-DOI citations. [56]
    • Mentions WikiCite among other Related Works.
  • Crossref charges a per-article fee for member institutions to deposit citation lists. Members are assigned a DOI org id when they join.
  • Information about journal titles and ISSNs at Crossref. [57]
  • Crossref allows (and encourages) separate licensing statements for the Version of Record (vor), Accepted Manuscript (am), and Text and Data Mining version (tdm). [58]. [added 06:23 Wed 16, AEST)]
  • Crossref members are required to link references with DOIs [59], and to format the DOIs a certain way []. Deposited references can be DOI or unstructured. Since members pay to deposit their metadata on Crossref, there is no scraping or collecting of reference lists from the source documents.
    • Crossref recommendations for displaying DOIs [60] "In 2015 we collaborated with Wikipedia to make all of their DOI links HTTPS."

Sun 6 edit

Governance and institutional memory edit

Rules and Policies as Negotiated Settlements and Trophies edit

[6]

https://people.eng.unimelb.edu.au/vkostakos/courses/socialweb10F/reading_material/5/butler08.pdf (do web search to find other free copies)

Fri 4 edit

https://thenewdaily.com.au/life/science/environment/2020/08/29/queensland-sets-aside-577000-hectares-as-a-koala-paradise/

August 2020 edit

edit · open

Sun 6 edit

Governance and institutional memory edit

Rules and Policies as Negotiated Settlements and Trophies edit

[7]

https://people.eng.unimelb.edu.au/vkostakos/courses/socialweb10F/reading_material/5/butler08.pdf (do web search to find other free copies)

Fri 4 edit

https://thenewdaily.com.au/life/science/environment/2020/08/29/queensland-sets-aside-577000-hectares-as-a-koala-paradise/

Sunday 30 edit

WDEMI edit

[expanded Tue 1, Wed 2]

I’ve been thinking over this for a week or more, especially after reading https://www.loc.gov/aba/pcc/documents/PoCo-2017/WorkEntitity%20Preliminary%20White%20Paper-2017-09-27.pdf [8]. FRBR/LRM have their 4-level WEMI model, and other systems have 3-level (BIBFRAME) or 2-level (e.g. a Library Management System (LMS, a.k.a. ILS for US readers),[9] I once worked with had catalogue-item and stock-item).

To me, the difference between a 1st edition and 2nd revised edition is quite unlike the difference between a novel and its translation or screenplay or cinematic interpretation. Yet FRBR treats all those as “Expressions” of the underlying Work.

I was considering a 5-layer model: Work, Derivative, Expression, Manifestation, Item (WDEMI). But on writing this, I started to consider that something like a movie based on a book is qualitatively different from a translation.

What IFLA (FRBR / LRM) BIBFRAME Schema.org,

OCLC Schema,

Schema Bib Extend

WDEMI Wikidata item class Wikidata property
Original work Work Work schema:CreativeWork Work work, and subclasses such as written work, literary work
Adaptation Expression Different Work schema:CreativeWork or subclass such as schema:Book, schema:Movie Derivation Usually a different work?
Translation translation, edition or version
Edition (with content differences, e.g. rev.ed.) Work? schema:CreativeWork + schema:Product Expression
Different format (hardcover, paperback, ebook) Manifestation Instance schema:CreativeWork + schema:ProductModel Manifestation Multiple properties on an item, or separate Q-items?
Digital preservation scan of a specific item ? Manifestation? But it could have some item-like museum style metadata such as provenance.
Reprinting (with same pagination) ? ?
Parts bound differently by recipient Item?
Items Item Item schema:CreativeWork + schema:ProductItem Item n/a

“The work concept is defined fuzzily in all these models. To the extent that the concept can be defined, it must be extracted from the set of relations that are valid between instances. For example, if translation is not a valid relation between works in RDA, then the translation of a work does not result in a new RDA work, but since translation is a valid relation between works in BIBFRAME, the translation of a work can result in the creation of a new BIBFRAME work...”

Open questions:

  • How to treat say an edition of a novel that contains both the text of the novel itself, plus a biography or explanatory notes by another author? Copyright will be different for each part. But the item will be sold under the name of its main part, and identifiers such as ISBN apply to the whole. Does the Manifestation contain multiple Expressions or Works? Or is it the Expression that contains other Expressions? Does it make any difference if different editions are word-for-word identical in their main part but differ in end-matter?
  • How do you handle multiple digital-preservation scans of different items (or even the same item!) from the same manifestation (e.g. print run)? They may have very different scanning production processes, so would become separate manifestations. What if the same scan is encapsulated in different formats (PDF, ePub, …): are they separate manifestations, and if so what is the next layer up that connects them? What if the same scan is made available at different websites presenting different metadata and page navigation?
  • How to represent reprint years? Significant event with qualifiers is cumbersome.
  • WIkidata has items for museum pieces, should it have Q-items for specific significant library books? E.g. a book that was used to create a digital scan. What properties/statements would you make on the item rather than elsewhere? Holding institution, location, catalogue number, collection, ...
  • For referencing/citation purposes, how do you handle things that are the same translation, edition or version but have different pagination or page numbering? Do differences in numbering always warrant a separate item, even when the content is otherwise identical?

For OCLC Schema Model, see https://www.oclc.org/content/dam/research/publications/library/2013/2013-05.pdf (mentioned at BIBFRAME#See Also).

Friday 28 edit

Whose knowledge? I wonder how long these edits will stand on Wikidata? The "famous IT consultant" not only has an IMDb page, but also a page on Sinhalese Wikipedia. Hah! That article has a Controversy section sourced to a website with a self-signed certificate. Google refuses to translate it.

Update: lasted a day, undone by an IPv6 mobile device. Possibly the subject/author/owner of the item has an email alert set for watchlist.

Sunday 16 edit

d:Wikidata:WikiProject Source MetaData has links to explore on WikiCite, using Scholia, SourceMD, Wikidata lists, collaborators. Plus steps for profiling authors.

See also https://figshare.com/articles/Some_Fun_with_Wikicite_and_WikiCite_in_Wikidata_TechStorm_2018_/7454915

d:Wikidata:Entity Explosion Chrome plug-in.

"The Wikipedia War That Shows How Ugly This Election Will Be: An editing battle over Kamala Harris’s race is a sign of what’s to come." (2020-08-13, The Atlantic [limited monthly views])[61] Joshua Benton does a good job of communicating Wikipedia processes in this article.

Tuesday 11 edit

Misc. edit

Friday 7 edit

Toxic edit

[Fram incident] could be an example where there is a violation of the UCoC and the community was unable to intervene, while the user was seen as 'toxic'. So it is about protecting the community and protecting the values ​​of the projects. ... Ciell Jul 4, 2020 8:28 PM (CEST)

[quotes are in original, but might be denoting foreign word rather than acting as scare quotes]

Incidentally, I think toxic is a buzzword that has blown over from American English and nowadays, as a result of expansion, is almost meaningless, which should be avoided where possible. Wutsje 4 Jul 2020 21:02 (CEST)

[machine translations from Dutch] (permalink]). (06:48 Fri 07, AEST)

WMF CoC edit

On Dutch Wikipedia, Marrakech points out [62]

Code of conduct for the WMF

This code of conduct for the WMF seems to me to be a much better idea than the code of conduct that it intends to impose on the various communities.

The last rule of conduct - The WMF recognizes that it is, by far, less diverse than the different communities representing all cultures of the world. It will not attempt to impose their notions of civility upon the communities with very diverse cultural backgrounds in the form of a central "code of conduct" - exposes an interesting paradox and incongruity: the WMF's intention to subject all chapters worldwide to one and the same code of conduct is at odds with its self-proclaimed commitment to diversity. For example, the preoccupation with alleged privileges, and the idea that certain groups would lack them, is exclusively American in origin. Yet that preoccupation is clearly reflected in the Contributor Covenant that must form the foundation of the universal code of conduct (Question: Doesn't this code of conduct just promote political correctness? Answer: Only if you define political correctness as the belief that women, non-binary people, gay, lesbian, queer, and / or transgender people, people of color , and people of different religious backgrounds should be afforded the same rights and privileges as everyone else ). Marrakech ( concert ) 4 Jul 2020 10:31 (CEST)

Wednesday 5 edit

UCoC and rogue wikis edit

It’s all fine and good to say "no personal attacks", but then you get situations like "Personal attack" saying became an excuse for banning unwanted users. Requests for comment/Vote of confidence on sysops and unblock for user Deu on kawiki#Comment by SHOTHA. Admin accountability and preventing abuses of power has to come first. Otherwise people will take all the fine CoCs and twist them to their own ends.

NC licenses edit


Sunday 2 edit

Brazil wants to legislate against fake news, requiring services to identify their contributors and distinguish them by nationality. [63] [64]

July 2020 edit

edit · open


Friday 31 edit

17:12 Fri 31, AEST

Wednesday 29 edit

Tuesday 28 edit

Rebranding edit

Monday 27 edit

Old tabs edit

Sunday 26 edit

Not-so-short descriptions edit

Mikhail Gorbachev, "1985–1991 General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union"! What’s wrong with "Soviet leader"?

Hmm, Minerva search dropdown the lines wrap, but Timeless & Minerva related articles they are truncated. iOS app the search dropdown doesn’t wrap but is full width.

Old tabs edit

Saturday 25 edit

Reply tool edit

Indications of signature in visual mode

Phab tasks

  • phab:T254117 Consider revising Reply tool's automatic edit summary.
  • phab:T249391 Add support for customizing edit summaries for comments posted using Reply tool.

Tuesday 21 edit

Limiting content width edit

How does the French saying go, "plus ça change..."? Or should that be déjà vu?

See also:

Vector Nueue edit

We can turn on New Vector via ?useskin=Vector&useskinversion=2. It makes a complete hash of section headings on iOS Safari.

Tuesday 14 edit

  • phab:T249391 "Add support for customizing edit summaries for comments posted using Reply tool"
  • phab:T257280 "Adjust the location of the tools within visual mode's toolbar"
  • phab:T257888 "Invite feedback about revised toolbar location on mw.org"
  • phab:T252445 "Consider changing the presentation of the visual mode's editing toolbar" (I replied on this one, also want to check more of the linked tasks.)
  • phab:T257867"Adding/editing descriptions should modify the local article, not Wikidata - iOS task"

Thursday 9 edit

Markdown and Wikitext edit

Markdown has some similar challenges as Wikitext when it comes to things like: misnested markup, embedded HTML, nesting block content (or detecting end-block), and round-tripping. CommonMark (help, spec) and vfmd (Vanilla Flavoured Markdown, intro, spec) both formulate tight specifications, but the solutions differ in some respects. (E.g. a paragraph followed by a heading with no blank line between.)

Bold, oblique, and spacey Japanese edit

Font engines might be capable of producing glyphs that are slanted or have thicker lines, but these don't look good in many scripts. So then how would HTML <em> and <strong> be rendered?

For Chinese characters and Japanese kanji, bold doesn’t really stand out from the surroundings. Oblique just looks weird; the equivalent of italic versus roman would be either (a) a brush-like font vs. a woodcut-like one, or (b) cursive versus non-cursive. To my mind, cursive kanji are visually more akin to western script fonts than to italics, but usage may be different. I’m not aware of them mixing cursive and normal fonts in a single text block the way we do with italics.

For Japanese kana, katakana is used like italics for foreign words and onomatopœa, and hiragana is "normal" text like roman. But they have separate code points like western capitals and unlike western italics. (Also there are big differences in glyph shapes kata vs. hira, like for caps vs. lc. To get the same effect in English we would typeset foreign words like KATAKANA in small caps, thus.)

Also, "proper" Japanese typesetting and handwriting doesn’t put spaces between words. But are there conventions for not splitting words across line breaks? That would be similar to how we hyphen-split words between not within syllables, which requires knowledge of the language (either lexical or phonological).

These issues become important if you have a markup syntax that applies bold/italics and/or depends on spaces.[67] Note mention of emphasis dots and overlines here. If you click the "B" on the little toolbar it adds the ** markers instead of <b> or <strong> [68] – the UI matters. (Those and similar were what got me thinking about this.)

MediaWiki editing widgets give special prominence to [B] and [I] buttons. This makes sense for English, but, for example, maybe the Japanese community would prefer a button for furigana? Which toolbar buttons can be customised by wiki admins?

Tuesday 7 edit

Wikimedia Space edit

[Wikimedia-l] Next steps on Wikimedia Space (thread started Feb 18); m:Talk:Wikimedia Space.

Some interesting comments on that meta talk page about the phrase "safe spaces".

“Building new walled gardens at the expense of onboarding” – James Salsman Feb 20 [69]

Comments from Risker about problems with TwitFace and Meta, and there being hundreds of "on-wiki" venues. Some very quotable sections there.[70] [Addendum 9 Jul: There was an earlier post where someone used the term TwitFaceTube or similar – I am so going to adopt that.]

Background: I hadn’t heard of Space until some time late 2019 or early 2020 when a W?Fer said discussion on an issue should happen there rather than on Meta. At the time I was taken aback at the continual tendency of Foundation and Affiliate types to use anything but our own MediaWiki software (movement strategy was being developed on GDocs at the time also). I tried going there but Discuss-Space failed to work on iOS10. Then within what seemed like only weeks, they announced shutdown. Fast forward to now, I encountered Discourse as part of setting up a Linux server at work, and discovered today that's what Discuss-Space ran on.

Monday 6 edit

[Wikimedia-l] Snøhetta and Wikimedia [71] (Jan), [72] (Feb, includes comments of WMF staff being fearful of talking to communities).

[Wikimedia-l] Cross-project promotion of Nordicism and white supremacist racial myths [73]

ICANN’s subsequent official summary of the comment period – which the organization’s board is said to have used to make a determination – did not reflect that strength of feeling, however, and gave almost equal weight to those in favor of the proposal as those against. Internet world despairs as non-profit .org sold for $$$$ to private equity firm, price caps axed, The Register. Sound familiar?

Sunday 5 edit

Pepperoni edit

I found this characterisation by Dan Szymborski on the mailing-list archive [74]:

Imagine I'm driving with three friends in my car and we're deciding where to go for dinner. They all say "anything but pizza." I respond, "well, I have the keys and you're in my car, so it's pizza."

After some grumbling, I tell them that their opinions are important and that they can pick the toppings for their pizzas. Well, not pick the toppings, but they can choose between "pepperoni," "extra pepperoni" or "half-pepperoni."

Naturally, there's some consternation about why I'm doing this and how that's not exactly a choice. Then I remind them that I'm still picking the toppings too, but their input on whether we get pepperoni, extra pepperoni, or half-pepperoni is super-valuable and will be taken into consideration.

— (23:46 Sun 05, AEST)

Other stuff edit

m:Friendly space policies, m:Talk:Black Lives Matter#Scientific racism

Wikimedia-l: [75] Butch Bustria, Sun Jun 21 06:29:39 UTC 2020. [76] Nataliia Tymkiv, Mon Jun 22 00:43:21 UTC 2020. Surely the board members were already aware of the ongoing shitstorm, and weren't just responding to the mailing list?

June 2020 edit

edit · open

Friday 3 edit

Wednesday 1 edit

Yeah, this should go on a new page. But it follows on from prev days.

Slide from quarterly review edit

https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Wikimedia_Foundation_first_quarter_2019-2020_tuning_session_-_Communications.pdf&page=7

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Annual_Plan/Tuning_sessions

More about rebranding edit

I was going to record more on the weekend and Monday than what I did.

The marketing manager has made a statement [to do: find link]. Former trustees posted dissenting views on the talk page. I was trying to re-find the materials from (IIRC) 2017. The Wolff-Olins stuff seems to be from late 2018 - looks like I'm off by a year.

  • July 2015 "The new Board members shared potential projects that they would like the Board to consider during their term. Some of the potential goals included assisting the relationship between the Wikimedia Foundation and the Wikimedia community, addressing some technical challenges, resolving potential branding inconsistencies or confusion, ..."
  • March 2017 "For the coming year, the FY2017-2018 plan introduces the use of cross-functional programs aligned with specific strategic priorities. These include ... the cross-departmental program on Brand and Identity, which include the Communications, Legal, and Advancement teams ..."
  • Nov 2018 "Based on their research, the Wolff Olins team explained that the best brand architecture for brand awareness and impact is to lead with Wikipedia instead of leading with Wikimedia. ... Trustees raised several points for consideration in moving forward, including the importance of being thoughtful in engaging the community, how we would lose any benefits from the current separation of the Wikimedia and Wikipedia brand if the Wikimedia brand goes away, where affiliate branding fits into the overall picture, and possible new names for the Wikimedia Foundation. ... The Board raised no objections to the Communications team doing further work on positioning the Wikimedia movement brands as tools for achieving the Wikimedia 2030 strategic vision."

(emphases added)

Board minutes edit

Notes from when I was scouring the minutes... [to do: make this a collapsible box]

2015-02 edit

minutes "Damon [VP Eng.] presented his first 90 days at the Foundation. ... He shared a detailed analysis of the development of the Visual Editor and MediaWiki core, and reviewed current processes for community engagement. ..."

2015-07 edit

minutes "The new Board members shared potential projects that they would like the Board to consider during their term. Some of the potential goals included assisting the relationship between the Wikimedia Foundation and the Wikimedia community, addressing some technical challenges, resolving potential branding inconsistencies or confusion, expanding the relationship between the Wikimedia Foundation and academic communities, and ensuring that there is a strategy for engaging with Wikimedia readers." (emphasis added)

2016-05 edit

minutes "how to reach out to members of the Wikimedia community that are not active on mailing lists." "The Board discussed with Katherine how to work with the Communications team to create a centralized Board page and how to better streamline staff support for the Board."

2016-04 edit

Governance Recommendations includes links for mission, guiding principles and values as at 2016.

2016-11 edit

minutes Funding approved for strategy process.

2017-02 edit

minutes "The team is working with Williamsworks, a firm that has experience working to build consensus from different constituencies" Strategy process is already a thing, is this the same strategy they are still working on?

2017-03 edit

[77] "For the coming year, the FY2017-2018 plan introduces the use of cross-functional programs aligned with specific strategic priorities. These include the cross-departmental program New Readers, which include the Product and Global Reach teams, the cross-departmental program on Brand and Identity, which include the Communications, Legal, and Advancement teams, the as well as the Community Health, Emerging Communities, Community Tech, Content Quality & Diversity, Structured Data on Commons, and Wikidata programs." (emphasis added)

2017-07 edit

minutes Problems with WM-FR.

= 2017-08 edit

From the minutes:

Over the past year, the Communications team worked on the Foundation's brand, took advantage of media moments, and responded to the global press interest in fake news, explaining how Wikipedia provides a reliable alternative source. We pushed back on a recurring narrative about how Wikipedia is declining or dying. We also initiated community-based marketing, allowing community members to support casting and scripting for Wikipedia promotional videos. In Iraq, where the Foundation first piloted this program, Wikipedia experienced a bump in readership. The Foundation is conducting research in Nigeria to establish a baseline for comparison ahead of a campaign in that country.

Not specifically rebranding, but I still have no idea what this means:

The direction indicates that Wikimedia will become a major support system for free knowledge. It is not just that the Wikimedia Foundation or community builds knowledge, but rather that they provide the foundational structure and bases for doing so. The exact terminology we end up using to describe this strategic direction is still under discussion.

With an M:

supporting the Wikimedia brand

And ... hmm:

The Board discussed their communication channels with the Wikimedia community. There are some statements that are published via email and on Meta-Wiki. Communication is an important part of the Board's role

2017-11 edit

We cannot expect 250,000 people to be good, efficient, and focused, if they do not feel that they are empowered and that their voice matters.

2018-04 edit

minutes "Supporting community engagement ... engage communities in conversation; join the discussions, including on mailing lists and Meta-Wiki; ..."

Monday 29 edit

Rebranding edit

I somehow managed to find and complete the branding survey on the weekend. Even if the survey is biased, I don' think suppressing awareness of it is helping anyone's cause.

Sunday 28 edit

Internet Archive and Commons import edit

Is IA in trouble?

Among other collections, F. has already done 12k c:Category:Books from the Biodiversity Heritage Library.

Monday 22 edit

Weeds edit

I was going to photograph some, but we already have a lot of images.

Aside: the Commons and Wikispecies boxes are in odd locations at Medicago polymorpha and Medicago.

Talk pages in iOS app edit

Phab:T215928

Monday 15 edit

Watching a Dave Chapelle performance. He mentions Eric Garner, Travon Martin, John Crawford, Philando Castile as prequel of the current situation. (external-linking those to avoid what-links-here)

[Addition 04:22 Mon 22, AEST]: "Australia had its own George Floyd moment, only it passed without international outrage". www.abc.net.au. 2020-06-01. Retrieved 2020-06-21.. Comparisons between a George Floyd and David Dungay were made on the radio, but didn’t seem to make TV news. I haven’t yet sought out written coverage, this article mentions Dungay. Also analyses the differences in reactions to Australian Aboriginal deaths in custody versus the Floyd killing.


Friday 5 edit

Rebranding edit

"Consultation" has been moved back to 16 June. meta:Talk:Communications/Wikimedia brands/2030 movement brand project#Naming convention proposal discussions starting 16 June.

Related pages:

  • meta:Talk:Brand Network (talk) – "a space for collaborating on the development of an evolved brand system for the Wikimedia movement".

States edit

Campaign Zero has a cool visualisation where each US state is represented as an equally-sized square. The entire grid is 8×12. Even though the west coast WA–OR–CA is only three squares, it still works somehow.

When you only have six states to work with, it doesn’t have the same effect:

NT Qld
WA SA NSW
Vic
Tas

or

Qld
WA NT NSW
SA Vic
Tas

Nerd harder! edit

Love it! Why haven’t I heard this phrase before now?

From Nemo ← Copybuzz ← Techdirt ← Julian Sanchez

Tuesday 2 edit

Lists in Talk edit

VE and NWE feedback form edit

Turns out the problem with en-wp is technical, not organizational. Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 181#VE and NWE feedback page, Please centralize enwiki's feedback for VisualEditor

May 2020 edit

edit · open

Sunday 31 (kinda) edit

Still dark outside, so I can get away with calling it Sunday, not Monday. (06:08 Mon 01, AEST)

OMG, there was an update about the WMF rename at meta:Requests for comment/Should the Foundation call itself Wikipedia#May Update. A new project page is at meta:Communications/Wikimedia brands/2030 movement brand project (talk).

There's a meta:MediaWiki Stakeholders' Group.

I might have to start watchlisting on other projects.

Tuesday 26 edit

Ideas from MW edit

MMiller makes the distinction between personalized and customized at mw:Talk:Growth/Personalized first day/Newcomer homepage#"My work" [79].

iPad keyboards and wikitext edit

English keyboard changed somewhere around iOS 11 or 12. [These notes could possibly be developed into a full standalone user page.]

There are still 4 modes, which I’ll call lc, caps, num, extras. Getting from letters to extras takes two taps.

When you hit space bar, it takes you out of the current mode back to lc. This is a royal pain if you have a sequence of numbers and symbols to enter.

The new keyboard introduced a drag-down feature where you pull down on a key to access an alternate. From lc and caps, you can pull down to get get nums (including common symbols); from nums you can pull down to get extras. But I find the swipe down mechanism hard to activate at speed: I tend to flick the key and not pull it far enough. Also, it’s clunky for doubled symbols like [[ – is faster to quick double-tap.

symbol(s) used for old new comment
= headings extras nums moved from upper-right to bottom middle
* bullet list extras nums
/* section in edit summary different modes (num–ext) same mode (num) easier to type in new

Sunday 24 edit

Seaside photography edit

Visited the coastline yesterday, over an hours' drive, for a small photo session. As luck would have it, spitting rain and high tide when I got there, so only animals from the high-littoral and splash zone were accessible.

Challenge with the SLR was that my stock zoom lenses don't focus very close and aren't good for small subjects. I could get much closer with an iPhone, but inspecting the photos after the fact discovered they are a lot less sharp. Dodging the periodic waves and placing tripod added to the fun.

In future, some kind of glass-bottom container (or a dive mask in a pinch) might help with reflections for underwater subjects. Or a linear polarising filter.

Next challenge is identifying the species. There wasn't a lot of variety in the narrow range of depth on this exposed shelf. I didn't photograph all these, but here's a list of the common ones seen at high water:

 
Blue periwinkle, with coin to show scale.
  • Austrolittorina unifasciata, called blue periwinkle though I'd maybe say mauve. These tiny shells are common around Sydney, occurring in the highest stratum. I sometimes wonder how they get by, with many out-of-water above the high-tide mark. Couldn't find in Sea Shells of NSW, but found name due to [80]. It's kind of satisfying that the AG article is illustrated with a photo from Commons, less so that the en-wp article doesn't include photos which show the colour well.
    • My shots are photographically no better than the the ones already in Commons, though I did take some alongside a 10¢ coin for scale: . I like the close view, sharp focus and shallow DoF of this c:File:Austrolittorina unifasciata 003.jpg. Museums Victoria has a couple of very good photos that are CC-BY [81].
  • Nerita melanotragus. [82] has N. atramentosa. "According to Wikipedia", the two were formerly considered conspecific, but the on the east coast would be N. melanotragus I noticed a lot of tiny juveniles in addition to the adults. Didn't bother with photos because this species is dead common, but we don't have any live shots on commons.
  • Austrocochlea porcata, the zebra top snail.
  • Tenguella marginalba, the mulberry whelk. Have been working on the taxonomy of these and their relatives. One of the reasons I made the trip.
  • Red waratah anemone, Actinia tenebrosa. Spotted one green anemone, but the red ones were common. The existing photo on that article is heaps better than what I could achieve.
  • Various limpets. Barnacles on more exposed rock faces. A species with striped conical shell that I haven't yet identified. Briefly spotted a small crab but a wave came in before I could snap it. Some neptune's necklace, Hormosira banksii, that stuff washes up everywhere.

Friday 22 edit

Wikipedia:VisualEditor/Feedback currently has 35 sections and 6 replies. (07:35 Fri 22, AEST)

Thursday 21 edit

mw:VisualEditor/Feedback#Does VE munge white space?

Wednesday 20 edit

Comparing use of headings in discussion spaces edit

@JKlein (WMF) Your phrase “more similar to email than comments” raises a thought that I'd like to unpack. I'm interested to know if it is something that your team has discussed?

It all depends which conventions you are used to:

  • Web forums almost always(?) have a subject/topic heading/title for a new post/OP/thread/topic/discussion in a category/board/discussion/topic. (“Topic” and other words are variable and overloaded, which makes it really hard to talk about the, ahem, topic in general terms. But that's a whole separate discussion.)

Usually the top post is a fairly plain question or observation with an unhelpful heading like “help needed”, but sometimes it could be a complete how-to, walkthrough or FAQ that has a different character from the plainer commentary posts that follow: compare news sites and blogs below. Apart from the heading, there's usually no software-enforced specialness about the top post, but social conventions attach to the OP (original post / original poster) within a thread.

  • On Twitter, at the other end of the spectrum, you just throw your 160 characters into the aether and hope The Algorithm shows it to somebody. Hashtags and at-mentions started as user conventions that were then turned into clickable search facets. Reply threading didn't really exist and there was definitely no concept of a coherent conversation to attach a heading or summary to.
  • News sites, blogs, YouTube have a separation between the main content and the comments. To what extent is The article/page definitely does have a subject heading (and by-line, date, etc.). Traditionally the comments appear ...

This is getting too long. I want to copy-paste what I've written to preserve it somewhere else, so that I can simplify this post and make it more readable. BUT I CAN'T COPY PASTE IN THIS GODDAM S.D. EDITOR ON AN IPAD! (In either visual or markup mode. IIRC, applies to Visual Editor also.) I'm going to have to commit this reply, then copy it, then come back and edit it. If you're reading this in the interim, hold off replying as this post will change.

(First save 06:33 Wed 20, AEST. Original post.)

Sunday 17 edit

Alt text edit

The current WHATWG HTML Standard section 4.8.4 has guidance on using alt text when an image has a caption. In their case, it's HTML5+ figcaption, but the principle also applies to our [[File:|…|captions]]. Short answer: do provide a non-empty alt when a caption is present, even though the image might not require one if it was uncaptioned.

Lightbulbs edit

Don't think I've seen Wikipedia:How many Wikipedians does it take to change a lightbulb? before. Of course there's a navbox Template:Wikipedia essays.

Wikipedia Library Card Platform edit

meta:The Wikipedia Library/Building a Digital Library looks promising, until you realise the page hasn't been edited since 2017, and the talk page is a redlink. Did the things expected "within 6 months" ever eventuate?

Last year, Sam Walton wrote I’m happy to say that the more comprehensive solution to this problem is finally right around the corner! While the development on authentication-based access and the Library Bundle was unfortunately delayed for quite some time due to legal discussions, we’re now moving ahead with technical implementation and are currently scheduled to be up and running before the end of the year. (VPP at 18:19, 2 August).

Related links: https://wikipedialibrary.wmflabs.org, WP:TWL, WP:RX, phab project …

I created an account via OAuth, but still not clear if the bundle is available. phab:T235262 would suggest not. The main paywalls I would butt into from the Apply list would be Elsevier (waitlisted), JStor (avail), and maybe Cambridge (waitlisted).

More: external articles from the newsletter

Saturday 16 edit

HTML spec edit

From section 2.1.8 Conformance classes:

Authoring tools are exempt from the strict requirements of using elements only for their specified purpose, but only to the extent that authoring tools are not yet able to determine author intent. However, authoring tools must not automatically misuse elements or encourage their users to do so.

<dd> for indenting, anyone?

Wednesday 13 edit

Annotations edit

I've been reading about W3C Annotations (data model, protocol, etc.). An unfortunate limitation is they require standalone Annotations service that hands out JSON-LD. It would be cool if you could embed annotation data using HTML+RDFa. Note that an explicit aim of the recommendations it to not require complicated RDF graphs or inference and query engines.

By coincidence, I just stumbled on T149667 Amazing Article Annotations (2016–2017). Wouldn't it be awesome if Wikimedia had an Annotations project akin to Wikidata? It's not just about storing the annotations, but also a UI for creating and displaying them.

Who would police that for slander and other inappropriate content? Where would you draw the line between genuine criticism, calling bullshit for what it is, versus outright attacks? Would each person own (and be responsible for) their note content, or would the wiki way be that notes are community-created? Would the service host note-content or just annotation links? Even if the latter, you could still cause mischief by mis-linking a comment to a target not intended by its author.

Would you start fresh, or build it on top of MediaWiki, utilising WikiBase, namespaces, discussions, revisions, etc.?

Compare web snipping programs like Copernic or Evernote, where you're also capturing a snapshot of the content. For MediaWiki sites, you already have a permanent revision to link to, but what about the general case? Could you have a Annotation object reference both the live version and the Internet Archive copy? Or would you have one note body and two Annotion links to the two targets?

(04:12 Wed 13, AEST)

Mon 11 edit

Talk Pages project edit

User testing edit
  • T239175 Conduct a control test of as-is reply workflow Dec–Feb. 2 iterations of 5 subjects each. (a) 4 desktop, 1 mobile; 2/5 ESL; not logged in, sparse talk page. (b) 5 desktop; 1 ESL; talk page with many existing comments.
    • Unsurprisingly, signing & indentation were problems, and subjects viewed the history page as a confusing jumble. Interestingly, the test found that subjects had trouble finding their reply after they had published it.
  • T245798 Conduct a control test of as-is reply workflow (mobile). Planned, no action yet.
  • T236921 Nov–Dec. 5 desktop users.
    • Language used by subjects to describe the new reply experience was positive, in contrast with the history page. Surprisingly, still "Several participants took several minutes to find their reply on the page", despite the reply-in-place.
    • Several were unpleasantly surprised at having their IP address revealed. This raises a good point: once this makes it to prod'n, will logged-out users get the big scary warning?
    • Difficulties with history page are partly connected with the subjects not being logged in. I wonder if the other revisions had a good smattering of usernames, or just a sea of IPs? (Scrolling down, I see Pp suggested having them log in for future tests.)
  • mw:Talk pages project/replying#Usability testing

les Cafés edit

French Wikipedia's Avenue of cafés & bistros has a table of .

They also have a jargon page translation. Wonder if we have an equivalent?

Reading their Bistro through machine translation is like viewing our fora through a distorted mirror. Despite being separate communities, we have so much in common.

Sun 10 edit

MediaWiki improvement projects edit

The more I check my notifications, the more I digress into these areas.

Indenting with definition lists is evil edit

Tue 5 edit

Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 180#New traffic report: Daily article pageviews from social media

Talk Pages edit

Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 180#Parsoid's effects on talk pages post by WAID 10 Apr.

Dark themes edit

Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 180#Excessive use of style attributes makes custom theme changes (e.g. dark theme) difficult-to-impossible 24 Mar.

Monday 4 edit

Zen Garden edit

Is now live and linked from my sig.

Ideas:

  • René Magritte (page) is not René Magritte (Wikidata item), with pipe.
    • (update 06:28 Thu 14) Dammit, he died in 1967; the painting is unfree for another 17 years in countries that follow the Mickey Mouse law.
  • Blank page with just shortdesc "white space, raked pebbles".
  • Leonardo is not Michelangelo, with RDFa sameas assertion (lie).
  • Barbie knows Ken RDFa / FOAF claim, with photos as the visible content. Maybe "+" sign for knows, or to link to an RDF processor.
  • One hand clapping we will rock you.
  • Something about Isidore Ducasse?
  • Mu? Moo!
    • 💬 🐂
    • μ that makes moo or mew sound when clicked.
    • Seussy 1 mu, 2 moo, mew μ, moo μ; trout link to one fish two fish
  • Symbols: [83] ࿋

Approach: vary short descriptions; edit summary is title, same at commentary; vary display at Z; vary symbol/emoji in sig (for season or special occasion rather than target content, as sigs are subst'd); commentary permalinks to first occurrence, might rotate content back in.

(05:01 Tue 05, AEST / 19:01 Mon 04, UTC)

Echo chamber a.k.a. notifications overload edit

I now have 44 notifications taunting me from the top of the page. I'm slightly afraid to click the icons to find out... (05:09 Mon 04, AEST)

Extended content

Details

  • Alerts
    • 2 from Sidebar RFC
    • 1 from VPT discussion tools
    • 1 from 6mo ago BLPN – is the "read" status stored locally on each device? Or did I intentionally leave this unread?
    • 4 "from 3 other wikis"
  • Notifications
  • 1 page reviewed
  • 1 thanks
  • 34 notices from MediaWiki – thanks, Structured Discussions!

Okay, over 3⁄4 of that is Structured Discussions from MediaWiki. Sigh. (05:25 Mon 04, AEST)

Sunday 3 edit

Misordered miscellany edit

  1. ^ Gemetto, Jorge (25 June 2021). "Wikipedia and open access academic repositories: the case of Colibrí". Diff. Retrieved 30 July 2021.
  2. ^ Martin Poulter, quoted in Orlowitz, Jake; Stinson, Alex (16 September 2015). "Writing an open-access encyclopedia in a closed-access world". Diff.
  3. ^ Moody, Glyn (2015-09-14). ""WikiGate" raises questions about Wikipedia's commitment to open access". Ars Technica. Retrieved 2021-07-30.
  4. ^ bluerasberry. "Wikipedia, open access, and The Wikipedia Library". Retrieved 2021-07-30.
  5. ^ "Wikipeevedia". www.michaeleisen.org. Retrieved 2021-07-30.
  6. ^ Butler, Brian; Joyce, Elisabeth; Pike, Jacqueline (2008-04-06). "Don't look now, but we've created a bureaucracy: the nature and roles of policies and rules in wikipedia". Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. CHI '08. Florence, Italy: Association for Computing Machinery: 1101–1110. doi:10.1145/1357054.1357227. ISBN 978-1-60558-011-1.
  7. ^ Butler, Brian; Joyce, Elisabeth; Pike, Jacqueline (2008-04-06). "Don't look now, but we've created a bureaucracy: the nature and roles of policies and rules in wikipedia". Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. CHI '08. Florence, Italy: Association for Computing Machinery: 1101–1110. doi:10.1145/1357054.1357227. ISBN 978-1-60558-011-1.
  8. ^ "Preliminary White Paper" (PDF). Library of Congress. Library of Congress Program for Cooperative Cataloging. 2017. {{cite web}}: Cite uses deprecated parameter |authors= (help)CS1 maint: url-status (link)
  9. ^ This isn’t just a case of the US wanting to be different from the rest of the English-speaking world: Sony has/had a trademark on "LMS" in USA and Japan. which prevents/ed it’s use as a generic term there.
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