User talk:Cmglee/archive2019
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Facto Post – Issue 20 – 31 January 2019
editFacto Post – Issue 20 – 31 January 2019
 The Editor is Charles Matthews, for ContentMine. Please leave feedback for him, on his User talk page.
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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?). 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.
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MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 10:53, 31 January 2019 (UTC)
Commons request
editHi, further to your request at Commons, I note that you are editing regularly. To enable me to consider your request, please advise which IP addresses are causing issues and why these need to be used rather than the ones through which you have been recently editing? Just Chilling (talk) 14:27, 14 February 2019 (UTC)
- Hi Just Chilling, 54.240.197.239 has issues but there may be others my org uses that I'm unaware of. I move around and am sometimes at this site. Of course, I could edit only from the one that works but it would be Wikipedia's loss if I find errors or insufficiencies but can't correct them because my org is blocked. I'm happy with arrangement you provided last time, so could you please repeat what you did in Nov 2017? Thanks, cmɢʟee⎆τaʟκ 13:27, 15 February 2019 (UTC)
- I have granted an IPBE for a further 12 months. Happy editing! Just Chilling (talk) 18:15, 17 February 2019 (UTC)
- Many thanks, Just Chilling – much appreciated! cmɢʟee⎆τaʟκ 19:22, 17 February 2019 (UTC)
- I have granted an IPBE for a further 12 months. Happy editing! Just Chilling (talk) 18:15, 17 February 2019 (UTC)
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.
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.  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? 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.
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MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 10:01, 28 February 2019 (UTC)
Wikimania 2019 scholarships
editDid you see they are now open for applications? Charles Matthews (talk) 21:32, 28 February 2019 (UTC)
- Yes, I did. Thanks, Charles. cmɢʟee⎆τaʟκ 21:51, 28 February 2019 (UTC)
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.
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. 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.
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MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 11:45, 28 March 2019 (UTC)
Thank you!!
editHi! Yesterday I published this essay about correlation and just wanted to let you know that a lot of it started with your Comparison_convolution_correlation.svg. It really helped get me thinking visually about it, and rewarded careful study and attention. I can't imagine how many people there are out there who feel the same, even if they never track you down to say it!! You have a lil shoutout in the essay's acknowledgements. Cheers from NYC Tophtucker (talk) 17:01, 25 April 2019 (UTC)
- Hi Tophtucker! Many thanks for your kind words – I'm glad you found my illustration inspirational as I hope to make STEM clearer and more accessible with diagrams. I found your essay excellent, and especially liked your graphs and animation. Well done! Do let me know if there's another diagram you think would be useful for me to work on. Cheers, cmɢʟee⎆τaʟκ 17:41, 25 April 2019 (UTC)
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.
 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.
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MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 11:27, 30 April 2019 (UTC)
Facto Post – Issue 24 – 17 May 2019
editFacto Post – Issue 24 – 17 May 2019 The Editor is Charles Matthews, for ContentMine. Please leave feedback for him, on his User talk page.
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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.
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.
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Query about making graphs
editHello, Cmglee. May I ask your expert advice? I'm wondering if you can tell me whether there is any sort of template or similar that would allow arithmetic manipulation of graph series. Say, plotting data serieses y1, y2, y3, and the sum or mean of all three over time, or turning a list of numbers of people diagnosed by date into a graph of culative cases in an epidemic. Presumably one could write one with Lua, but I'd rather not duplicate work if something exists.
- Hi HLHJ, Thanks for your message. I remember we communicated about the meta:Community_Wishlist_Survey_2019/Multimedia_and_Commons and File:Kugel_fountain_schematic.svg.
- I wouldn't say my advice is "expert" :-) but I've come across the Graph extension. If it doesn't suit your needs, there are other similar templates. I've also hacked EasyTimeline for non-chronological use.
I'm also really impressed by your Sanky chart of the planet's heat balance. SVG linewidths are such an obviously suitable tool. I have some data I need to present in a Sanky chart; do you have any general advice on making Sanky charts with SVG? On a random subject, I suspect you may also find muqarnas fascinating (there's a bit more structural and geometric information in older versions of the article). HLHJ (talk) 15:32, 11 June 2019 (UTC)
- Thanks! Just some random thoughts:
- Plan the chart on graph paper or PowerPoint-like software.
- Use circular (elliptical) arcs instead of Bézier curves to make parallel lines.
- Increase the stroke-width slightly to avoid unsightly gaps (likely due to rounding and anti-aliasing) between lines of the same colour, e.g. as in File:Sankey_diagram_human_circulatory_system.svg.
- Not quite a Sankey diagram, but you can use SMIL to animate the stroke-dashoffset e.g. as in [1].
- I'd be glad to see your Sankey chart. Do let me know if you need any help.
- Yes, I was interested in muqarnas in the late 90s. Their 3D structure is difficult to represent in a drawing, though. Cheers, cmɢʟee⎆τaʟκ 02:08, 14 June 2019 (UTC)
New tools for interactive diagrams
editHi. I'm working on some ideas for new open source tools for creating interactive diagrams. If you'd like to help influence their design, send me an email. I'd really welcome some input from your experience. JamesCrook (talk) 11:22, 19 June 2019 (UTC)
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Your Featured picture candidate has been promoted Your nomination for featured picture status, File:JewelSingaporeVortex1.jpg, gained a consensus of support, and has been promoted. If you would like to nominate another image, please do so at Wikipedia:Featured picture candidates. Armbrust The Homunculus 23:19, 16 June 2019 (UTC)
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Improvements
editCould you add hover interactivity in this image? https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File_talk:Venn6.svg --Backinstadiums (talk) 11:52, 11 July 2019 (UTC)
Done cmɢʟee⎆τaʟκ 12:49, 11 July 2019 (UTC)
- @Cmglee: Thanks. Can you also add the "coordinates", like the ones in this image ? https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:6-set_Venn_diagram.svg --Backinstadiums (talk)
![[1]](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c2/Circulatory_system_SMIL.svg){kind=link}
13:34, 11 July 2019 (UTC)
- That would be quite messy, as the shapes are not as simple as triangles. Even the triangle one is already pretty cluttered! cmɢʟee⎆τaʟκ 19:23, 11 July 2019 (UTC)
- @Cmglee: I do not understand why the three circles are the same color. how about using the six different colors (3 primary (red, yellow, blue), 3 secondary (orange, green & purple)) as well as the resulting ones? Alternatively, a linguistic/semantic example would enhance the graphic and make it more easy to grasp --Backinstadiums (talk) 22:41, 11 July 2019 (UTC)
- That seems reasonable, though it will mean having to modify other files of that series to match (commons:Category:Blank_Venn_diagrams). I'd suggest first asking for feedback on its talk page, and pinging its creator, Roomsixhu for a second opinion. Cheers, cmɢʟee⎆τaʟκ 04:18, 12 July 2019 (UTC)
- @Cmglee: Do you know how to move this conversation to its talk page? --Backinstadiums (talk) 09:23, 12 July 2019 (UTC)
- Done I just copied the relevant parts to commons:file_talk:Venn6.svg cmɢʟee⎆τaʟκ 13:15, 12 July 2019 (UTC)
- @Cmglee: I do not understand why the three circles are the same color. how about using the six different colors (3 primary (red, yellow, blue), 3 secondary (orange, green & purple)) as well as the resulting ones? Alternatively, a linguistic/semantic example would enhance the graphic and make it more easy to grasp --Backinstadiums (talk) 22:41, 11 July 2019 (UTC)
- That would be quite messy, as the shapes are not as simple as triangles. Even the triangle one is already pretty cluttered! cmɢʟee⎆τaʟκ 19:23, 11 July 2019 (UTC)
Picture 4 is no Venn diagram. The main purpose is to generate logic conclusions therefore they are simply combinatoric. You can draw simple diagrams up to four, with five and more you have always to follow a border to get all the parts you need. --Room 608 (talk) 16:38, 16 July 2019 (UTC)
That's a really nice template. NB, this discussion suggested a page move. I'll leave it with you. --Dweller (talk) Become old fashioned! 08:54, 18 July 2019 (UTC)
- Hi Dweller, Thanks for the compliment and apologies for confusing you with the extension. I think having it is useful as it informs editors that, unlike other templates, it's purely an image thumbnail. Furthermore, it gives the image type (extension). Finally, the exact filename of the image is there, should anyone want to go directly to the image page. Cheers, cmɢʟee⎆τaʟκ 17:09, 18 July 2019 (UTC)
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| ≤ 2O1O | 2O11 | 2O12 | 2O13 | 2O14 | 2O15 | 2O16 | 2O17 | 2O18 | 2O19 |
| 2O2O | 2O21 | 2O22 | 2O23 | 2O24 | |||||