#19 - world of information
9:47am, 19th Jan 2021 | 11 Comments
Blog by Sampson
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6.7 km run this morning
It's getting warmer! I could've done without the gloves today. And I'm feeling the mileage increase in my legs.
[This ended up being longer than anticipated! tl;dr: do you know of any fetchies who are on Wikipedia?]
A while back, Fetch mentioned his desire to see this site on Wikipedia. Of course, anyone could go on there and add an article for Fetcheveryone. But, in all likelihood, it would be taken down. I have a backdoor strategy.
The problem is that Wikipedia - quite rightly - uses the criterion that something must be 'notable' in order to warrant its own article. Marie Curie deserves a Wikipedia article, but I do not. The operational definition of notability is that the existence of the thing must be verifiable. Essentially, if Fetcheveryone is to have a Wikipedia article, someone somewhere, independent of the site, must have written about it. That's surprisingly tricky for a website. There aren't many serious sources writing about websites.
While there is no Wikipedia article for me, there is a Wikidata item. Wikidata is a structured database of information that is used by Wikipedia.
Wikidata also uses the notability criterion, but there is an alternative. An item need not be 'notable' if its inclusion 'fulfills a structural need'. This is where the Wikidata item for me comes in. I'm an author of academic articles, which are on Wikidata. They are notable insofar as other articles by other people cite them. Adding me to Wikidata makes the database more useful as a knowledge graph because having me as an item creates links between all of the papers that I have authored. Even though I am not notable, there are about 25 other Wikidata items (which are notable) linking to me.
Fetcheveryone could be added to Wikidata if it makes the database more useful. Just adding the site as a Wikidata item isn't particularly useful. But there are other options. The best one, I think, would be to use identifiers from Fetcheveryone as identifiers on Wikidata. Most Wikidata items use indentifiers. These are means of disambiguating things from other things with the same name, and of linking to other sources.
I can see three options for Fetcheveryone:
Races
e.g. 2015 London Marathon (london-marathon-103450) wikidata.org
Clubs
e.g. 100 Marathon Club (2) wikidata.org
People
e.g. Me (65832) wikidata.org
There aren't many races or clubs on Wikidata, and hardly any on Wikipedia. But there are lots of people. And, as far as I can tell, the Fetch profile ID is persistent. It could therefore be added as an identifier to Wikidata. I could trigger this process.
But to ensure success, we would really need to find somebody who is on Wikipedia and on Fetcheveryone. This would pretty much ensure that the property would be accepted. This would then open the floodgates for the likes of me (who just happen to be on Wikidata) to have our own Wikidata item use the Fetcheveryone identifier, thus creating many links to Fetcheveryone on Wikidata. Fetcheveryone would then be in the world of Wikimedia. While that won't ensure that Fetcheveryone appears on Wikipedia, it will facilitate its inclusion if the notability criteria can be satisfied at a later date.
So, your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to find someone on Fetcheveryone who has a Wikipedia article about them. Ideally an athlete, but anyone will do!
And here's today's song!
Randy - Addicts of Communication
It's getting warmer! I could've done without the gloves today. And I'm feeling the mileage increase in my legs.
[This ended up being longer than anticipated! tl;dr: do you know of any fetchies who are on Wikipedia?]
A while back, Fetch mentioned his desire to see this site on Wikipedia. Of course, anyone could go on there and add an article for Fetcheveryone. But, in all likelihood, it would be taken down. I have a backdoor strategy.
The problem is that Wikipedia - quite rightly - uses the criterion that something must be 'notable' in order to warrant its own article. Marie Curie deserves a Wikipedia article, but I do not. The operational definition of notability is that the existence of the thing must be verifiable. Essentially, if Fetcheveryone is to have a Wikipedia article, someone somewhere, independent of the site, must have written about it. That's surprisingly tricky for a website. There aren't many serious sources writing about websites.
While there is no Wikipedia article for me, there is a Wikidata item. Wikidata is a structured database of information that is used by Wikipedia.
Wikidata also uses the notability criterion, but there is an alternative. An item need not be 'notable' if its inclusion 'fulfills a structural need'. This is where the Wikidata item for me comes in. I'm an author of academic articles, which are on Wikidata. They are notable insofar as other articles by other people cite them. Adding me to Wikidata makes the database more useful as a knowledge graph because having me as an item creates links between all of the papers that I have authored. Even though I am not notable, there are about 25 other Wikidata items (which are notable) linking to me.
Fetcheveryone could be added to Wikidata if it makes the database more useful. Just adding the site as a Wikidata item isn't particularly useful. But there are other options. The best one, I think, would be to use identifiers from Fetcheveryone as identifiers on Wikidata. Most Wikidata items use indentifiers. These are means of disambiguating things from other things with the same name, and of linking to other sources.
I can see three options for Fetcheveryone:
Races
e.g. 2015 London Marathon (london-marathon-103450) wikidata.org
Clubs
e.g. 100 Marathon Club (2) wikidata.org
People
e.g. Me (65832) wikidata.org
There aren't many races or clubs on Wikidata, and hardly any on Wikipedia. But there are lots of people. And, as far as I can tell, the Fetch profile ID is persistent. It could therefore be added as an identifier to Wikidata. I could trigger this process.
But to ensure success, we would really need to find somebody who is on Wikipedia and on Fetcheveryone. This would pretty much ensure that the property would be accepted. This would then open the floodgates for the likes of me (who just happen to be on Wikidata) to have our own Wikidata item use the Fetcheveryone identifier, thus creating many links to Fetcheveryone on Wikidata. Fetcheveryone would then be in the world of Wikimedia. While that won't ensure that Fetcheveryone appears on Wikipedia, it will facilitate its inclusion if the notability criteria can be satisfied at a later date.
So, your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to find someone on Fetcheveryone who has a Wikipedia article about them. Ideally an athlete, but anyone will do!
And here's today's song!
Randy - Addicts of Communication
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