@vrandecic@mas.to
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vrandecic

@vrandecic@mas.to

Husband. Dad. Cat housemate. PhD. Works on Abstract Wikipedia and Wikifunctions at Wikimedia Foundation. Wikidata founder. Previously: ontologist at Google, Wikimedia Trustee, and RPG author. Berkeley, CA, roots in Brač, Croatia, grew up in Germany. he/him. Views my own.

Posting cat pics and occasionally other stuff.

#tootfinder

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vrandecic, to random
@vrandecic@mas.to avatar

Is there a list of @wikipedia and related Mastodon bots that shout out the picture of the day from Commons, article of the day, etc?

vrandecic,
@vrandecic@mas.to avatar

@voxpelli @wikipedia @rauschma thanks!

vrandecic, to animals
@vrandecic@mas.to avatar

He always prefers water from our glass

vrandecic, to random
@vrandecic@mas.to avatar

"They don't let you edit your own wiki page, Steph"

https://youtu.be/cs4oS3bASf0

futurebird, to random
@futurebird@sauropods.win avatar

I think one of the things that lets former professionals slip into crackpoting around is the mythology in STEM about the Great Scientist who had the Big Idea... and it's always some neat little equation or law-- something that's both simple and critical to the field. Those are the Men Who Are Remembered.

In response to this good video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aY985qzn7oI

1/

vrandecic,
@vrandecic@mas.to avatar

@futurebird I just saw that plotline in Quantumania

vrandecic, to random
@vrandecic@mas.to avatar

I've been a friend of Universal Basic Income for thirty years, but I'm the last twenty years, I have growing reservations about it, and many questions. This article about an experiment with a right to work was the first text I read on it that substantially impacted my thinking on this (text is in German). I recommend reading it.

https://perspective-daily.de/article/2567-was-passiert-wenn-dir-der-staat-einen-job-garantiert/BDn2v8pM

1/4

vrandecic,
@vrandecic@mas.to avatar

Work is not just a source of money, but for many also a source of meaning, pride, structure, motivation, social connections. Having voluntary access to work seems to be one major component that is necessary on a societal level, in addition to a universal basic income that allows that everyone can live in dignity.

2/4

vrandecic,
@vrandecic@mas.to avatar

Note: I think work should be widely construed. If someone has something that fills that need, that's work. Raising children, taking care of a garden, writing a book, refining piano skills, creating art, taking care of others, taking care of yourself, all these easily count as work in my book.

3/4

vrandecic,
@vrandecic@mas.to avatar

I wish we were willing and able to experiment with different ways of structuring society as we are willing and able to experiment with technology. We deployed the Internet to the world without worrying about the long term consequences, but we're cautious about giving everyone enough money to not be hungry. That's just broken. I was always disappointed about the fact that sociology and politics as studied and thought by academia were mostly descriptive and not constructive endeavors.

4/4

wikipedia, to random
@wikipedia@wikis.world avatar

It's now possible to mark links to your user page as verified on Mastodon!

Documentation: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Help:Extension:RealMe

This was developed and implemented by @taavi who wrote it as a extension, named "RealMe". It's open source (like all of the Wikipedia software) and can be used on any MediaWiki wiki: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:RealMe

vrandecic,
@vrandecic@mas.to avatar

@evan @timbray @wikipedia @taavi

It should be in Wikidata.

I see two possible approaches, there are probably more: either through a signed statement, or through checking the editor who contributed the fact. The latter is an unusual step, the former requires some work.

I'm not sure what a decent way to do this would look like.

cwebber, to random

instances were a mistake

vrandecic,
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@cwebber Plato agrees

vrandecic, to random
@vrandecic@mas.to avatar

Today it's been exactly twenty years since I made my first edit to Wikipedia. It was about the island of Brač, in the German Wikipedia.

https://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Bra%C4%8D&oldid=123911

vrandecic, to random
@vrandecic@mas.to avatar

"Wikidata: The Making Of"

The history of by Markus Krötzsch, @nightrose , and me. From the inception of the idea to the project proposal and development, and the first ten years of @wikidata

Video on YouTube with a recording of the presentation (not the actual presentation from The Web Conference, though):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P3-nklyrDx4

Paper as HTML:
https://dl.acm.org/doi/fullHtml/10.1145/3543873.3585579

Paper as PDF (Open access):
https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3543873.3585579

vrandecic, to random
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vrandecic, to random
@vrandecic@mas.to avatar

I totally geeked out on this and had lots of fun writing this: flying from California to New Zealand on March 31st to April 2nd, how much April 1st did we experience?

Lengthy, detailed, confusing. Instead of avoiding April fools' day, we ended up having it three times.

http://simia.net/wiki/Main_Page

vrandecic, to animals
@vrandecic@mas.to avatar

Cat tube day

sarahjamielewis, to random
@sarahjamielewis@mastodon.social avatar

There is an alternate timeline where the semantic web took off and there was wide investment in ontological tooling to ensure that the information in academic papers, websites, and applications was structured and accessible to future processing.

We instead live in a world where all the useful data is trapped inside proprietary formats, and entangled in meaningless prose - a world primed for large language models to come along and hallucinate the data that might contained therein.

vrandecic,
@vrandecic@mas.to avatar

@Madagascar_Sky @sarahjamielewis I found this one painful and I don't agree with all of it, but very well written:

https://twobithistory.org/2018/05/27/semantic-web.html

In my opinion it misses Wikidata, but I'm biased.

vrandecic,
@vrandecic@mas.to avatar

@shriramk @WiseWoman @Madagascar_Sky @sarahjamielewis

Those are very relevant observations, and this leads to the one large question the Semantic Web never answered: how does the incentive infrastructure look like? The few parts of the Semantic Web that provided a decent answer to that question were the ones that were successful: schema.org, Wikidata and the wider GLAM world, usage inside emails, inside organizations as a data integration technology.

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