Wikimedia Forum/Archives/2019-01

From Meta, a Wikimedia project coordination wiki

FileExporter beta feature

Johanna Strodt (WMDE) 09:41, 14 January 2019 (UTC)

This request is active for two years. What should be done?--Ancient Hellene (talk) 20:19, 14 January 2019 (UTC)

You can follow up with the language committee.  — billinghurst sDrewth 21:34, 14 January 2019 (UTC)
@Ancient Hellene: We're working on a policy modification that (if approved) will make Ancient Greek eligible. Please be patient. StevenJ81 (talk) 21:57, 14 January 2019 (UTC)

flickr2commons and token authorization...

Flickr2commons had a major revision of its interface, not too long ago.

The old interface used to ask us to re-authorize a token, every couple of months, and provided a link to where to do that.

The new interface doesn't, and stopped working for me a day or two ago, producing cryptic error messages about files being empty.

I think this may mean my token expired...

I looked for where to reauthorize, and couldn't find any advice.

  1. So, do I need to re-authorize my token?
  2. Anyone else experiencing flickr2commons failing?
  3. Comments on other ways the old interface was superior welcome anywhere?

Cheers! Geo Swan (talk) 17:47, 17 January 2019 (UTC)

You should ask your question on https://bitbucket.org/magnusmanske/ Ruslik (talk) 20:32, 17 January 2019 (UTC)
@Geo Swan: flickr2commons authenticates using "OAuth Uploader" (an OAuth application), so you should be able to manage your components through your special:preferences on any wiki, all leads to Special:OAuthManageMyGrants. I just tried its authentication and it works for me. I didn't try an upload.  — billinghurst sDrewth 23:04, 17 January 2019 (UTC)

Lengthy debate about Wikipedia on the Humanist Discussion Group

It would be good to hear what digital humanists think about Wikipedia, also to listen to their negative experience when trying to engage with Wikipedia. The topic has been opened on January 8 and concluded by Ken Friedman on January 26. You are going to find other contributions inbetween at the Humanist Discussion Group under the thread thoughts on Wikipedia? --Hladnikm (talk) 09:13, 27 January 2019 (UTC)

Thanks. (If you consider a thread with 20 messages lengthy, you're definitely not used to Wikimedia discussions!) What an atrocious installation of mailman is that? Is there a threaded version? Nemo 15:12, 27 January 2019 (UTC)
... lengthy concerninig other topics in that forum. Humanist Discussion Group dates back in 1987, hence such a retro look. The forum software designer Malgosia Askanas proved through debate to be the most passionate opponent of Wikipedia. I was surprised at the lack of knowledge among colleagues digital humanists, how Wikipedia works and what Wikipedia is all about. --Hladnikm (talk) 16:47, 27 January 2019 (UTC)

About bots creating a lot of articles

Hello! I was not sure if I should post on this forum about what I plan to say, but whatever. First of all, English is not my native language, so my apologies if you find any mistake. What I want to talk about is about bots who create a lot of articles, like this famous w:Lsjbot. I am not against the use of bots, because in many cases they help a lot for correcting grammar and ortography mistakes and to detect vandalism. But what I do not support is that those bots are used to create massive amounts of articles in Wikipedias like the Swedish, Cebuano and Samareño ones. On this article you can see that the depth of the mentioned wikipedias is very low, so that means that they need a lot of updates and many things to do. I would not like to assume anything, but in this case I can say that most articles of those wikipedias must have a lot to be done, corrected and fixed. I would like to know if it is possible that bot users stop doing that please. For me that list does not make any sense because it is unfair that Wikipedias which use massively those bots are the top ones, while Wikipedias which have a lot of active users, who do their best to improve the quality and quantity of their respective wikipedias, increase slower the quantity of their articles. --Humberto del Torrejón (talk) 08:18, 28 January 2019 (UTC)

"Unfair" to whom? We've fixed this problem ten years ago: Top Ten Wikipedias. Some people continue to use article count for their rankings, but that's their fault: go tell them to reach our decade.
The general matter has mostly settled down since the biggest discussion on the topic, Proposal for Policy on overuse of bots in Wikipedias. Lsjbot is an experiment which has potentially harmed only a handful smaller Wikipedias (with some annoying side-effect on Wikidata), nothing most people would need to be concerned about. Nemo 08:23, 28 January 2019 (UTC)
I don't get caught up in the bots, leave them to the wiki communities, they have control over what happens. Some wiki communities will focus on numbers, others will focus on quality. The proof of success is ultimately the viewer.  — billinghurst sDrewth 11:16, 28 January 2019 (UTC)

Daty Wikidata Editor alpha release

Hi everyone,

I am Pellegrino Prevete, aka Ogoorcs and I am proud to officially announce the alpha version (Q2122918) release of Daty (Daty (Q60949478)), the native Wikidata editor I proposed at the Ideathon of itWikiCon 2018 (Q43527331), which aims to hugely simplify Wikidata UX for new and old advanced users.

During this first development month, as hoped, Daty has found approvals outside of wiki communities, too: the GNOME (Q44316) project has in fact accepted to host it on its development platform and the software has already been published on Flathub (Q43089335), the free software GNU/Linux app store in Flatpak (Q22661286) format.

Unfortunately I was not able to pack all planned features in this first release, although I hope that, trying it, you will agree that the work done has been adequate.

Set up sound foundations for the program was where it took longer than expected, i.e. make it work on all supported platforms and on all screen format factors. In fact at the time of writing Daty is one of the few responsive GTK (Q189464) applications and the only cross-platform one.

To calm down the potential storm of people fearing for vandalisms caused by a simpler editor, I must warn you that until an adequate revert tool for mass edits made with the program will be made available, Daty will browse the database *read-only*. At this time already it has been made so (not specifically in Daty) that only registered users will be able to edit entities.

Download

Installer links are available for Microsoft Windows (64 bit) and GNU/Linux (all architectures).

You can read a more complete changelog on my blog; bug reports can be sent on the issues page.

Note for GNU/Linux users

If you use a Flathub-integrating distribution (Linux Mint, Endless OS and others), you can directly install the software from your graphical package manager. If your distribution preinstalls GNOME and GNOME Software (Q15968880), you will just need to open the *Activities* screen and search for "Daty", as seen in this picture.

In any case you can install flatpak on your distribution by visiting this page or follow the distro specific installation istructions on the Daty homepage.

If you already installed a previous flatpak of the software, I advice you to wait for the update of tomorrow (build already scheduled), because of a last-minute bug in the configuration directory permission settings which has been corrected this morning.

Note for Ubuntu users

Since at this time Ubuntu has decided to support by default only the Snap (Q22908866) package format, you will not directly find the program in the software center. If there are enough requests though, I will make a snap version of Daty.

In any case deb (Q305976) packages will be made available in due time.

Note for Mac users

The software works on Mac, but since I do not own one I could not create the executable file. Again, if there are enough requests, we can find a way to solve this.

Thanks

First of all I want to thank Wikimedia CH for trusting the idea; without them Daty would still be a mockup this day. I hope that the global community, as the Italian one already did at the ItWikiCon Ideathon, will see the impact and the usefulness of a native editor, to please advanced users and greet new ones.

Of course I have to thank the GNOME project, which accepted the project on its infrastructure, and its developers, volunteers and contributors, who saved me from many headaches this month and before. I think it is a really great community.

Ogoorcs (talk) 01:47, 30 January 2019 (UTC)