Jump to content

User:The ed17/Archives/124

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia


The Bugle: Issue CXLIIV, April 2018

Full front page of The Bugle
Your Military History Newsletter

The Bugle is published by the Military history WikiProject. To receive it on your talk page, please join the project or sign up here.
If you are a project member who does not want delivery, please remove your name from this page. Your editors, Ian Rose (talk) and Nick-D (talk) 09:55, 8 April 2018 (UTC)

Facto Post – Issue 11 – 9 April 2018

Facto Post – Issue 11 – 9 April 2018

The 100 Skins of the Onion

Open Citations Month, with its eminently guessable hashtag, is upon us. We should be utterly grateful that in the past 12 months, so much data on which papers cite which other papers has been made open, and that Wikidata is playing its part in hosting it as "cites" statements. At the time of writing, there are 15.3M Wikidata items that can do that.

Pulling back to look at open access papers in the large, though, there is is less reason for celebration. Access in theory does not yet equate to practical access. A recent LSE IMPACT blogpost puts that issue down to "heterogeneity". A useful euphemism to save us from thinking that the whole concept doesn't fall into the realm of the oxymoron.

Some home truths: aggregation is not content management, if it falls short on reusability. The PDF file format is wedded to how humans read documents, not how machines ingest them. The salami-slicer is our friend in the current downloading of open access papers, but for a better metaphor, think about skinning an onion, laboriously, 100 times with diminishing returns. There are of the order of 100 major publisher sites hosting open access papers, and the predominant offer there is still a PDF.

Red onion cross section

From the discoverability angle, Wikidata's bibliographic resources combined with the SPARQL query are superior in principle, by far, to existing keyword searches run over papers. Open access content should be managed into consistent HTML, something that is currently strenuous. The good news, such as it is, would be that much of it is already in XML. The organisational problem of removing further skins from the onion, with sensible prioritisation, is certainly not insuperable. The CORE group (the bloggers in the LSE posting) has some answers, but actually not all that is needed for the text and data mining purposes they highlight. The long tail, or in other words the onion heart when it has become fiddly beyond patience to skin, does call for a pis aller. But the real knack is to do more between the XML and the heart.


To subscribe to Facto Post go to Wikipedia:Facto Post mailing list. For the ways to unsubscribe, see below.
Editor Charles Matthews, for ContentMine. Please leave feedback for him. Back numbers are here.
Reminder: WikiFactMine pages on Wikidata are at WD:WFM.

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.
Newsletter delivered by MediaWiki message delivery

MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 16:25, 9 April 2018 (UTC)

This Month in GLAM: March 2018





Headlines
Read this edition in fullSingle-page

To assist with preparing the newsletter, please visit the newsroom. Past editions may be viewed here.


Semi protection for created article

Semi-protection: High level of IP vandalism (Lobosuperstar (talk) 21:43, 13 April 2018 (UTC))

Our discussion

If you don't mind, I'd like to put this one to bed. My actions had the desired effect, which was to get the behaviour in question stopped. I'll bear in mind what you have said when a similar situation arises. No real damage has been done, has it? So, unless you feel that this needs to be escalated, I'd really like to close the conversation. Mjroots (talk) 06:44, 16 April 2018 (UTC)

Thanks for committing to bear what I've said in mind—I'm glad you've seen that there can be a difference between what's called vandalism and what some would call disruptive. Given that, I've got no plans to escalate anything. Ed [talk] [majestic titan] 01:12, 17 April 2018 (UTC)

Books & Bytes - Issue 27

The Wikipedia Library

Books & Bytes
Issue 27, February – March 2018

  • #1Lib1Ref
  • New collections
    • Alexander Street (expansion)
    • Cambridge University Press (expansion)
  • User Group
  • Global branches update
    • Wiki Indaba Wikipedia + Library Discussions
  • Spotlight: Using librarianship to create a more equitable internet: LGBTQ+ advocacy as a wiki-librarian
  • Bytes in brief

Arabic, Chinese and French versions of Books & Bytes are now available in meta!
Read the full newsletter

Sent by MediaWiki message delivery on behalf of The Wikipedia Library team --MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 14:50, 18 April 2018 (UTC)

January to March 2018 Milhist article reviewing

Military history reviewers' award
On behalf of the Milhist coordinators, you are hereby awarded the WikiChevrons for reviewing a total of 3 Milhist articles at PR, GAN, ACR or FAC during the period January to March 2018. Thank you for supporting Wikipedia's quality content processes. AustralianRupert (talk) 09:35, 20 April 2018 (UTC)

Keep track of upcoming reviews. Just copy and paste {{WPMILHIST Review alerts}} to your user space

The Signpost: 26 April 2018