oravrattas - Network

Ooops. Forgot to post about this week's shufflings here. Though presumably it doesn't matter, as you've all subscribed to get it...

Ooops. Forgot to post about this week's shufflings here. Though presumably it doesn't matter, as you've all subscribed to get it by email and avidly read it on Tuesday night anyway, right? Right?

https://shuffled.beehiiv.com/p/shuffled-2025-02

I've been talked into taking what I discover tracking political comings-and-goings worldwide, and turning it into a weekly newsletter....

I've been talked into taking what I discover tracking political comings-and-goings worldwide, and turning it into a weekly newsletter. So if you're interested in keeping up with world events through the prism of watching who's out and who's in, look no further than https://shuffled.beehiiv.com/

(And, as always, very happy for people to point out all the typos and other mistakes I've undoubtedly made, or other stories I've missed.)

Happy Sammarinese Captains Regent Investiture Day to all those to celebrate.

Happy Sammarinese Captains Regent Investiture Day to all those to celebrate.

Hmm, @maxlath are the constant warnings I'm getting from wikibase-cli that punycode is deprecated something I can avoid by upgrading...

Hmm, @maxlath are the constant warnings I'm getting from wikibase-cli that punycode is deprecated something I can avoid by upgrading something somewhere? I don't know my way around the node ecosystem well enough to track down exactly where it's coming from.

Today in "Why is this #Wikidata query no longer working?"… Someone has decided that the United Kingdom (Q145) isn't actually...

Today in "Why is this #Wikidata query no longer working?"…

Someone has decided that the United Kingdom (Q145) isn't actually a member of the UN / NATO etc, because the member is instead the "realm of the United Kingdom" (Q124653007). I'm not entirely convinced that this is correct, but even if it were, this sort of change seems guaranteed to break a *lot* of queries in ways that aren't going to be obvious how to fix.

@maxlath Upgrading #wikibase-cli 16.x to latest seems to have broken `wb search --cirrus`, which is now throwing 'Error: srprop is not a...

@maxlath Upgrading #wikibase-cli 16.x to latest seems to have broken `wb search --cirrus`, which is now throwing 'Error: srprop is not a valid option' from `wikibase-sdk/dist/src/queries/cirrus_search.js:12`.

wikibase-sdk and node are both at latest versions. Is there something else I need to twiddle, or is there a regression here? (Going back to 16.3 fixes it again)

Not sure if my brain hasn't quite woken up yet, or if #Wikidata has gone wonky again. Can someone test this query —...

Not sure if my brain hasn't quite woken up yet, or if #Wikidata has gone wonky again. Can someone test this query — https://w.wiki/6N$6 — and see what endPrecision they're getting on this claim? I'm seeing precision 9 on every run, but the value on the item has been 13th July (precision 11) since October 2021, and there have been no edits at all since last November. Am I missing something obvious?

This afternoon I noticed that the current President of Georgia is listed in #Wikidata as having previously been Ambassador of France to...

This afternoon I noticed that the current President of Georgia is listed in #Wikidata as having previously been Ambassador of France to Georgia. I thought this had been entered back-to-front, but no. She took dual-citizenship to become Georgian Foreign Minister, and then later renounced her French citizenship so she could run for President. TIL.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salome_Zourabichvili

#TodayInWikidata I finally scratched a long-standing itch, and worked out how to take wtf-wikipedia's JSON representation of a...

#TodayInWikidata I finally scratched a long-standing itch, and worked out how to take wtf-wikipedia's JSON representation of a #Wikipedia page, and add the #Wikidata ID for each link.

I mainly use this to find differences in politicians' infoboxes vs their Wikidata items, but I'm sure I'll find lots of other uses now that I've figured this out.

https://gist.github.com/tmtmtmtm/68c99ebe6fdb407c2dcd39a2a63edde9 is the initial version, though I'm sure I'll have to tweak it later for odd edge cases. (Improvement suggestions very welcome!)

@maxlath Can wikibase-cli turn a list of multiple wikipedia URLs or page names into Wikidata IDs, other than by iterating through them one...

@maxlath Can wikibase-cli turn a list of multiple wikipedia URLs or page names into Wikidata IDs, other than by iterating through them one by one and capturing the results of `wd id`? This doesn't seem to have a batch option, and I'm not seeing much else that goes in this direction.

I guess I could pass them to a SPARQL query along the lines of https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:SPARQL_query_service/queries/examples#Wikidata_items_of_Wikipedia_articles but perhaps there's an alternative approach I haven't thought of?

@legoktm @LucasWerkmeister Is there any way you could tweak the rate-limit setting a bit here? Often I can barely scroll through more than a...

@legoktm @LucasWerkmeister Is there any way you could tweak the rate-limit setting a bit here? Often I can barely scroll through more than a single page of my timeline before my screen fills with "Rate limited Please retry after <time>" messages. I had to wait over 20 minutes to even be able to post this.

@maxlath Is there a way to have wikibase-cli return lastmod dates for a list of items without also fetching a lot of extra other info too? I...

@maxlath Is there a way to have wikibase-cli return lastmod dates for a list of items without also fetching a lot of extra other info too? I don't see a command directly for that, but I'm also struggling with paring the output from `wd data` back far enough.

`wd --props modified` returns the shortest output I've found (only id and type), but ironically enough _not_ the 'modified'.

I can work around for now via SPARQL, but not sure if I'm missing something or this isn't available atm.

#TodayInWikidata involved rather more Uzbek⇄Russian reconciliation than I had expected.Thankfully I know enough Cyrillic to be able to...

#TodayInWikidata involved rather more Uzbek⇄Russian reconciliation than I had expected.

Thankfully I know enough Cyrillic to be able to scan names against a Latin list for close-enough matches (it's not a quick process, but it's a lot easier for me than with, say, Arabic).

But with that, and a few item merges, #Wikidata's answer to "who are the current Members of the Legislative Chamber of #Uzbekistan?" has grown from this morning's "0 results" to the expected 150: https://w.wiki/63nh

Ideally Wikidata would have enough well-structured information to enable all the permutations that a consuming application might want, but...

Ideally Wikidata would have enough well-structured information to enable all the permutations that a consuming application might want, but that requires building up a standard set of idioms for how to enter the data, and of how to query it.

That's probably a long way away, but presumably there are _some_ steps we could be taking now.

I have a vague memory of talking to @fantasticlife about this, but can't remember (and can't find on a cursory search) how the Parliament Ontology handles this.

One particularly fun (FSVO) example is the 4th Northern Ireland Assembly, where one MLA was known by three different names as she got...

One particularly fun (FSVO) example is the 4th Northern Ireland Assembly, where one MLA was known by three different names as she got divorced, reverting to her unmarried name, and then re-married again within the same term.

Lists of members tend to use the third of these. Lists of election winners vary between the first and the third. The second rarely appears anywhere now, but will be presumably be attached to votes and speeches and bills and the like at the relevant time.

This is a relatively common issue in the UK, where moving between the two Houses of Parliament pretty much guarantees a label change, but...

This is a relatively common issue in the UK, where moving between the two Houses of Parliament pretty much guarantees a label change, but it's certainly not unique to it: someone getting married is another frequent cause for changing name (at least in some contexts; cf Cherie Blair/Booth).

And what to display in certain cases is not always obvious: in some contexts showing what someone was known by at that time makes more sense; in others their current name is probably better.

This is another version of the same issue that leads to historic lists like the members of the 1997-2001 House of Commons¹...

This is another version of the same issue that leads to historic lists like the members of the 1997-2001 House of Commons¹ anachronistically showing almost 70 Barons or Baronesses, i.e. that someone doesn't _really_ have a name, per se, but instead has one in a specific context in a given time

And although Wikidata gives us a variety of 'name' properties, all of which can then take relevant time and/or context qualifiers, we largely rely on labels instead (which can't)

¹https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:WikiProject_British_Politicians/lists/1997-2001

This morning's next rabbit-hole looks like being Brazilian pseudo-monarchy, as someone¹ has "helpfully" updated the #Wikidata...

This morning's next rabbit-hole looks like being Brazilian pseudo-monarchy, as someone¹ has "helpfully" updated the #Wikidata labels for all the members of the House of Orléans-Braganza², so the list of current members of the Chamber of Deputies now shows *Prince* Luiz Philippe.

This is another of those cases where I wish we didn't use labels so much, and had better structured name data instead.

¹https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/NewsRoyal

²https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Orl%C3%A9ans-Braganza

Aha! Treating Mastodon as a rubber duck* has led me to the obvious solution… I can add...

Aha! Treating Mastodon as a rubber duck* has led me to the obvious solution… I can add https://www.theboltonnews.co.uk/news/15498737.dr-brian-iddon-details-his-life-as-a-bolton-mp-in-second-volume-of-his-science-politics-an-unlikely-mixture/ as a second source to the claim, with a 'supports qualifier: reason for deprecated rank'.

That seems much more useful than the initial ideas I was coming up with: here the evidence that the source is incorrect will be in-place right beside it.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging

As #Wikidata is a database of claims, rather than of facts, we can't just delete this — it should be marked as deprecated. But I'm...

As #Wikidata is a database of claims, rather than of facts, we can't just delete this — it should be marked as deprecated. But I'm not sure how to best record _why_.

For now I've added a simple reason for deprecation of 'misunderstanding', though I'm sure there's something better.

But it would also be good to show why I believe that to be so. Adding his autobiography could help, but the important data there would live one-item-removed (and in theory it could have been posthumous).