You are invited to join us the "picnic anyone can edit" in Brooklyn's green Prospect Park, as part of the Great American Wiknic celebrations being held across the USA. Remember it's a wiki-picnic, which means potluck.

• Sunday July 29 Annual Wik-Picnic (RSVP) (also on meetup.com)

2–7pm - come by any time! Our reserved picnicking area is by Bartel-Pritchard Square entrance, located at Prospect Park West and 15th Street.

The picnic will be held by the park's Bartel-Pritchard Square entrance immediately on the lawn to your right as you walk through the lovely lotus columns.

Look for us by the Wikipedia / Wikimedia NYC banner!

We hope to see you there! --Pharos (talk) 08:23, 23 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Neglected diseases

To grasp the nettle, there are rare diseases, there are tropical diseases and then there are "neglected diseases". Evidently a rare enough disease is likely to be neglected, but neglected disease these days means a disease not rare, but tropical, and most often infectious or parasitic. Rare diseases as a group are dominated, in contrast, by genetic diseases.

A major aspect of neglect is found in tracking drug discovery. Orphan drugs are those developed to treat rare diseases (rare enough not to have market-driven research), but there is some overlap in practice with the WHO's neglected diseases, where snakebite, a "neglected public health issue", is on the list.

From an encyclopedic point of view, lack of research also may mean lack of high-quality references: the core medical literature differs from primary research, since it operates by aggregating trials. This bibliographic deficit clearly hinders Wikipedia's mission. The ScienceSource project is currently addressing this issue, on Wikidata. Its Wikidata focus list at WD:SSFL is trying to ensure that neglect does not turn into bias in its selection of science papers.

Links

• Wikipedia, Wikidata, and citations, a census, August 2 2018, blogpost by Magnus Manske
• The rise of Wikidata as a linked data source August 6, 2018, by Karen Smith-Yoshimura on OCLC Research blog
• Where do Mayors Come From: Querying Wikidata with Python and SPARQL, August 1 2018, Parametric Thoughts blog
• Newspapers On Wikipedia Update: Initial Wikidata Pass 9 August 2018, Mike Caulfield
• Google Scholar, Web of Science, and Scopus: a systematic comparison of citations in 252 subject categories Alberto Martín-Martín, Enrique Orduna-Malea, Mike Thelwall, Emilio Delgado López-Cózar, arxiv.org, submitted on 15 August 2018

You are invited to join the Wikimedia NYC community for our monthly "WikiWednesday" evening salon (7-9pm) and knowledge-sharing workshop at Babycastles gallery by 14th Street / Union Square in Manhattan. Is there a project you'd like to share? A question you'd like answered? A Wiki* skill you'd like to learn? Let us know by adding it to the agenda.

We will also follow up on plans for recent and upcoming edit-a-thons, museum and library projects, education initiatives, and other outreach activities.

• Wednesday August 29 WikiWednesday Salon and Skill-Share NYC (RSVP on-wiki or at meetup.com).

7:00pm - 9:00 pm at Babycastles gallery, 145 West 14th Street

(note the new address, a couple of doors down from the former Babycastles location)

We especially encourage folks to add your 5-minute lightning talks to our roster, and otherwise join in the "open space" experience! Newcomers are very welcome! Bring your friends and colleagues! --Pharos (talk) 23:51, 28 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

You are invited to join the Wikimedia NYC community for our monthly "WikiWednesday" evening salon (7-9pm) and knowledge-sharing workshop at Babycastles gallery by 14th Street / Union Square in Manhattan. Is there a project you'd like to share? A question you'd like answered? A Wiki* skill you'd like to learn? Let us know by adding it to the agenda.

This month will also feature on our agenda, upcoming editathons, the organization's Annual Meeting, and Chapter board elections - you can add yourself as a candidate.

We will include a look at the organization and planning for our chapter, and expanding volunteer roles for both regular Wikipedia editors and new participants.

We will also follow up on plans for recent and upcoming edit-a-thons, museum and library projects, education initiatives, and other outreach activities.

• Wednesday September 26 WikiWednesday Salon / Wikimedia NYC Annual Meeting (RSVP on-wiki or at meetup.com).

7:00pm - 9:00 pm at Babycastles gallery, 145 West 14th Street

(note the new address, a couple of doors down from the former Babycastles location)

We especially encourage folks to add your 5-minute lightning talks to our roster, and otherwise join in the "open space" experience! Newcomers are very welcome! Bring your friends and colleagues! --Pharos (talk) 20:42, 20 September 2018 (UTC)[reply]

The science publishing landscape

In an ideal world ... no, bear with your editor for just a minute ... there would be a format for scientific publishing online that was as much a standard as SI units are for the content. Likewise cataloguing publications would not be onerous, because part of the process would be to generate uniform metadata. Without claiming it could be the mythical free lunch, it might be reasonably be argued that sandwiches can be packaged much alike and have barcodes, whatever the fillings.

The best on offer, to stretch the metaphor, is the meal kit option, in the form of XML. Where scientific papers are delivered as XML downloads, you get all the ingredients ready to cook. But have to prepare the actual meal of slow food yourself. See Scholarly HTML for a recent pass at heading off XML with HTML, in other words in the native language of the Web.

The argument from real life is a traditional mixture of frictional forces, vested interests, and the classic irony of the principle of unripe time. On the other hand, discoverability actually diminishes with the prolific progress of science publishing. No, it really doesn't scale. Wikimedia as movement can do something in such cases. We know from open access, we grok the Web, we have our own horse in the HTML race, we have Wikidata and WikiJournal, and we have the chops to act.

Links

• ImageGrid SPARQL query for the Art+Feminism focus list on Wikidata. Run and then scroll ...
• The TABernacle tool for Wikidata editing, by Magnus Manske, has been upgraded. Demo with the ScienceSource focus list and main subjects: with a WiDar login you can edit directly in the table cells.
• Enslaved: People of the Historic Slave Trade, Michigan State University project for a linked open data platform. Quote: "Disambiguating and merging individuals across multiple datasets is nearly impossible given their current, siloed nature."
• As the Linked Data for Production (LD4P) project finishes its initial two-year cycle and moves into LD4P2, a list of its BIBFRAME and other RDF tools.
• Machine Learning with and for Semantic Web Knowledge Graphs, detailed slide pack by Heiko Paulheim, University of Mannheim.
• In Europe, Scientists Need to Share Their Research for Free if They Want Government Funding, Futurism, by Kristin House, 5 September 2018.

You are invited to join two events supported by the Wikimedia NYC community on Sunday October 14:

• Open House New York Weekend Upload Party @ NYU ITP

2:00pm - 6:00 pm at ITP, Tisch School of the Arts. New York University (721 Broadway, New York, NY)

The photo competition is at many sites all weekend, this is just the concluding event

• Indigenous People's Justice Edit-a-thon @ Interference Archive

2:00 - 5:00pm at Interference Archive (314 7th Street, Brooklyn, NY)

Note the new Park Slope location for Interference Archive

Have a WikiWonderful Weekend! --Pharos (talk) 04:53, 11 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]

You are invited to join the Wikimedia NYC community for our monthly "WikiWednesday" evening salon (7-9pm) and knowledge-sharing workshop at Triangle Arts Association in the DUMBO neighborhood of Brooklyn. Is there a project you'd like to share? A question you'd like answered? A Wiki* skill you'd like to learn? Let us know by adding it to the agenda.

We will also follow up on plans for recent and upcoming edit-a-thons, museum and library projects, education initiatives, and other outreach activities.

• Wednesday October 24 WikiWednesday Salon and Skill-Share NYC (RSVP on-wiki or at meetup.com).

7:00pm - 9:00 pm at Triangle Arts Association (Suite 317 & 318) at 20 Jay Street, Brooklyn

(note this month we will be meeting in DUMBO, Brooklyn, not at Babycastles)

We especially encourage folks to add your 5-minute lightning talks to our roster, and otherwise join in the "open space" experience! Newcomers are very welcome! Bring your friends and colleagues! --Pharos (talk) 01:27, 23 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Wikidata, the newest project of the Wikimedia movement, went live on October 29, 2012. Please join Wikimedia New York City as we celebrate its sixth birthday at the Ace Hotel. There will be (optional) lightning talks, casual conversation, and, most importantly, CAKE!

No experience with Wikidata? No problem. This event is open to all.

• Wikidata Birthday Party

• Date: Sunday October 28
• Time: 2:00 pm - 5:00 pm
• Location: Ace Hotel New York. 20 West 29th Street, Manhattan.
• RSVP: on Meetup.com or on Wikipedia

Newcomers are very welcome! Bring your friends and colleagues on Sunday!--Wikimedia New York City Team 15:32, 25 October 2018 (UTC)

Bonus edit-a-thons on Saturday

The day before the Wikiata Birthday, on Saturday, you are also welcome to join Archtober Wikipedia Edit-a-thon @ Bard Graduate Center or Black Lunch Table @ Magnum Foundation. Please RSVP to those pages if you plan on joining.

Wikidata imaged

Around 2.7 million Wikidata items have an illustrative image. These files, you might say, are Wikimedia's stock images, and if the number is large, it is still only 5% or so of items that have one. All such images are taken from Wikimedia Commons, which has 50 million media files. One key issue is how to expand the stock.

Indeed, there is a tool. WD-FIST exploits the fact that each Wikipedia is differently illustrated, mostly with images from Commons but also with fair use images. An item that has sitelinks but no illustrative image can be tested to see if the linked wikis have a suitable one. This works well for a volunteer who wants to add images at a reasonable scale, and a small amount of SPARQL knowledge goes a long way in producing checklists.

It should be noted, though, that there are currently 53 Wikidata properties that link to Commons, of which P18 for the basic image is just one. WD-FIST prompts the user to add signatures, plaques, pictures of graves and so on. There are a couple of hundred monograms, mostly of historical figures, and this query allows you to view all of them. commons:Category:Monograms and its subcategories provide rich scope for adding more.

And so it is generally. The list of properties linking to Commons does contain a few that concern video and audio files, and rather more for maps. But it contains gems such as P3451 for "nighttime view". Over 1000 of those on Wikidata, but as for so much else, there could be yet more.

Go on. Today is Wikidata's birthday. An illustrative image is always an acceptable gift, so why not add one? You can follow these easy steps: (i) log in at https://tools.wmflabs.org/widar/, (ii) paste the Petscan ID 6263583 into https://tools.wmflabs.org/fist/wdfist/ and click run, and (iii) just add cake.

Links

• Now Wikidata is six, Signpost Special Report
• Find out how @TheContentMine are attempting to mine scientific and medical literature to improve the accuracy of Wikipedia., Wikimedia UK tweet and video ScienceSource and the Semantic Web
• sciencesource-pmc-licenses tool by Oravrattas to extract Creative Commons license information from PubMed Central pages, created at the Cambridge Wikidata Workshop
• Whizzy use of SPARQL to map the London Underground system, whizzed past on Twitter.
• Wikidata birthday events mapped by SPARQL, too
• d:Wikidata:Sixth Birthday/Message from dev team

WikiCite issue

GLAM ♥ data — what is a gallery, library, archive or museum without a catalogue? It follows that Wikidata must love librarians. Bibliography supports students and researchers in any topic, but open and machine-readable bibliographic data even more so, outside the silo. Cue the WikiCite initiative, which was meeting in conference this week, in the Bay Area of California.

In fact there is a broad scope: "Open Knowledge Maps via SPARQL" and the "Sum of All Welsh Literature", identification of research outputs, Library.Link Network and Bibframe 2.0, OSCAR and LUCINDA (who they?), OCLC and Scholia, all these co-exist on the agenda. Certainly more library science is coming Wikidata's way. That poses the question about the other direction: is more Wikimedia technology advancing on libraries? Good point.

Wikimedians generally are not aware of the tech background that can be assumed, unless they are close to current training for librarians. A baseline definition is useful here: "bash, git and OpenRefine". Compare and contrast with pywikibot, GitHub and mix'n'match. Translation: scripting for automation, version control, data set matching and wrangling in the large, are on the agenda also for contemporary library work. Certainly there is some possible common ground here. Time to understand rather more about the motivations that operate in the library sector.

Links

• Wikidata and Libraries: Facilitating Open Knowledge, book chapter by Mairelys Lemus-Rojas, metadata librarian and Lydia Pintscher, Wikidata Product Manager, from Leveraging Wikipedia: Connecting Communities of Knowledge (2018)
• LD4P and WikiCite: Opportunities for collaboration, WikiCite 2018 program abstract, Christine Fernsebner Eslao of Harvard Library Information and Technical Services and Michelle Futornick, Linked Data for Production Program Manager at Stanford University
• Shell Lessons for Librarians, Library Carpentry lesson
• At-risk content on Flickr, blogpost 3 November 2018, Andrew Gray
• Toward an Abstract Wikipedia, recent white paper by Wikidata founder Denny Vrandečić (Google)

You are invited to join the Wikimedia NYC community for our monthly "WikiWednesday" evening salon (7-9pm) and knowledge-sharing workshop at Fordham University's Lincoln Center campus in Manhattan, near Columbus Circle. Is there a project you'd like to share? A question you'd like answered? A Wiki* skill you'd like to learn? Let us know by adding it to the agenda.

We will also follow up on plans for recent and upcoming edit-a-thons, museum and library projects, education initiatives, and other outreach activities.

• Wednesday December 19 WikiWednesday Salon and Skill-Share NYC (RSVP on-wiki or at meetup.com).

7:00pm - 9:00 pm at Fordham University's Lincoln Center campus (South Lounge) at 113 W 60th Street, Manhattan

(note this month we will be meeting in Manhattan, near Columbus Circle, not at Babycastles)

We especially encourage folks to add your 5-minute lightning talks to our roster, and otherwise join in the "open space" experience! Newcomers are very welcome! Bring your friends and colleagues! --Wikimedia New York City Team 03:21, 13 December 2018 (UTC)

Learning from Zotero

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

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

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

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

Links

• Zotero Comes to Google Docs, Zotero blogpost by Dan Stillman, 19 October 2018.
• Category:Wikipedians who use Zotero
• T115158 Write a Zotero translator and document process for creating new Zotero translator and getting it live in production, long Phabricator thread 2015–17.
• Zotero Translators, documentation from zotero.org.
• Home page on GitHub for Zotero translator Javascript
• Example translator, for Wikisource.
• m:Structured Data on Commons/Newsletter/2018-12-07

You are invited to join us at Ace Hotel for Wikipedia Day 2019, a Wikipedia celebration and mini-conference as part of the project's global 18th birthday festivities. In addition to the party, the event features keynote presentations, panels, lightning talks, and, of course, open space sessions.

And there will be cake.

We also hope for the participation of our friends from the Free Culture movement and from educational and cultural institutions interested in developing free knowledge projects.

• Sunday January 13 Wikipedia Day 2019 (RSVP at Eventbrite).

9:30AM - 6:00PM at Ace Hotel, 20 West 29th Street in Manhattan

We especially encourage folks to add your 3-minute lightning talks to our roster, and otherwise join in the "open space" experience! Newcomers are very welcome! Bring your friends and colleagues! --Wikimedia New York City Team 20:34, 3 January 2019 (UTC)

Everything flows (and certainly data does)

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

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

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

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

Links

• Wikipedia:Wikipedia Day for 18th birthday celebrations
• WMUK video page, with "fake news", Jimmy Wales, Wikidata and more (health warning for those with tune allergy)
• Why Wikipedia’s Medical Content Is Superior, Stephen Harrison, 28 January 2019, Slate
• Olivia Colman reveals struggle with Wikipedia over age, Naomi Gordon, 28 January 2019, harpersbazaar.com
• Making Wikidata visible, Martin Poulter blogpost, 24 January 2019, Bodleian Digital Library
• Inventory, Magnus Manske blogpost, 24 January 2019, on Wikidata tech support for an image donation by Cleveland Museum of Art

You are invited to join the Wikimedia NYC community for our monthly "WikiWednesday" evening salon (7-9pm) and knowledge-sharing workshop at Metropolitan New York Library Council in Midtown Manhattan. Is there a project you'd like to share? A question you'd like answered? A Wiki* skill you'd like to learn? Let us know by adding it to the agenda.

We will also follow up on plans for recent and upcoming edit-a-thons, museum and library projects, education initiatives, and other outreach activities.

• Wednesday February 27 WikiWednesday Salon and Skill-Share NYC (RSVP on-wiki or at meetup.com).

7:00pm - 9:00 pm at Metropolitan New York Library Council (8th floor) at 599 11th Avenue, Manhattan

(note this month we will be meeting in Midtown Manhattan, not at Babycastles)

We especially encourage folks to add your 5-minute lightning talks to our roster, and otherwise join in the "open space" experience! Newcomers are very welcome! Bring your friends and colleagues! --Wikimedia New York City Team 08:59, 27 February 2019 (UTC)

Art+Feminism’s sixth-annual MoMA Wikipedia Edit-a-thon will take place at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Education and Research Building, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 4 West 54 Street, on Saturday, March 2, 2019 from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. People of all gender identities and expressions are encouraged to attend.

And on Sunday this weekend:

• March 3, 2019 Art+Feminism with Kickstarter & Black Lunch Table, Brooklyn, NY

Stay tuned for other Art+Feminism and related edit-a-thons throughout the month!

What is a systematic review?

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

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.

Links

• Evidence-Based Practice: Appraise, resources page from Duke University Medical Library & Archives.
• What should Cochrane do next?, Bad Science blogpost 5 November 2014, Ben Goldacre.
• Cambridge (UK) Science Festival event, How do scientific discoveries become clinical medicine?, ScienceSource workshop for ContentMine 23 March 2019, with systematic review process diagram. Also on Eventbrite for tickets, taking place in Makespace, 16 Mill Lane.
• PROSPERO database of PRISMA, for registration of systematic review protocols.
• Process wonkery thread, wikien-l mailing list, September 2006.
• Meta-Analysis, xkcd cartoon.

You are invited to join the Wikimedia NYC community for our monthly "WikiWednesday" evening salon (7-9pm) and knowledge-sharing workshop at Metropolitan New York Library Council in Midtown Manhattan. Is there a project you'd like to share? A question you'd like answered? A Wiki* skill you'd like to learn? Let us know by adding it to the agenda.

We will also follow up on plans for recent and upcoming edit-a-thons, museum and library projects, education initiatives, and other outreach activities.

• Wednesday March 20 WikiWednesday Salon and Skill-Share NYC (RSVP on-wiki or at meetup.com).

7:00pm - 9:00 pm at Metropolitan New York Library Council (8th floor) at 599 11th Avenue, Manhattan

(note this month we will be meeting in Midtown Manhattan, not at Babycastles)

We especially encourage folks to add your 5-minute lightning talks to our roster, and otherwise join in the "open space" experience! Newcomers are very welcome! Bring your friends and colleagues! This month, optional post-meetup drinks afterward at 9pm!--Wikimedia New York City Team 18:46, 19 March 2019 (UTC)

Organized by Asia Art Archive in America]and Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs of the New York Public Library and in collaboration with Asia Art Archive in Hong Kong, the Art+Feminism: Wikipedia Edit-a-thon on Women in Art in Asia helps participants edit Wikipedia to create and improve articles about women artists and practitioners in and from Asia, including architects, designers, filmmakers, curators, and art historians. Books and research materials—as well as refreshments—will be provided.

Also check out other Art+Feminism and related edit-a-thons throughout the month!

Hello and welcome to the April events of Women in Red!

Please join us for these virtual events:

• New topics: Gender studies / United Nations / Dance
• Geofocus: Portuguese-speakers
• Continuing initiatives: Suffrage / #1day1woman

Other ways you can participate:

• Help us plan our future events: Ideas Cafe
• Join the conversations on our talkpage
• Follow us on Twitter: @wikiwomeninred

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