Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2017-11-24/News and notes
Cons, cons, cons
WikidataCon Berlin 28–29 October 2017
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, a knowledge base conceived ten years ago featuring automatic compilation from Wikipedia. The other keynote was from manager Lydia Pintscher, on the "state of the data". Interesting rumours flourished around Magnus Manske's mix'n'match tool and its 600+ datasets, mostly in digital humanities, and its adoption by the WMF. One also heard of an imminent Wikibase incubator site. Announcements came in talks: structured data on Wikimedia Commons is scheduled to make substantive progress by 2019. The lexeme development effort on Wikidata is not expected to make the Wiktionary sites redundant, but may facilitate future automated compilation of dictionaries.
And so it went, with five strands of talks and workshops running until 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 WikidataCon to a close. See a dozen and more reports by other hands. CM
- This piece was originally published in issue 6 of Facto Post.
Paid editing while in a position of trust
Two incidents recently occurred by individuals with a special position of trust in the English Wikipedia. Both involved paid editing; one resulted in a community ban, and the other is undergoing discussion at Arbcom and noticeboards with at least three administrators asking for revocation or resignation of the sysop bit.
The first case involves KDS4444 who was granted OTRS access as part of the
The second case involves Mister Wiki, a commercial Wikipedia editing firm, and Salvidrim! who has been an administrator on English Wikipedia since January 2013. The
The last well known sysop abuse of position incident was the 2015
A discussion "
Brief notes
- New chief product officer: The WMF appointed Toby Negrin as Chief Product Officer on 8 November 2017. Negrin was previously the Interim Vice President of Product.
- No new administrators: There are no new administrators for The Signpost to welcome; there were no requests for adminship between TonyBallioni's, which concluded on 19 October (reported in our previous issue), and Joe Roe's RFA, which started on 23 November.
- Milestones: The following Wikipedia projects reached milestones recently: Tajik Wikipedia: 90,000 articles (21 November); Latvian Wikipedia: 80,000 articles (17 November); Albanian Wikipedia: 70,000 articles (10 November); English Wikipedia: 5,500,000 articles (28 October)
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