DVrandecic (WMF)

Approval timeline

Hi Denny. Could you answer a couple quick questions about the what happened around the board approval of Wikilambda?

• When the board resolution approving the project was made on May 22, were you informed of the decision?
• If so, did the board (or WMF staff) specifically instruct you to not publicly reveal this information until the announcement six weeks later?

Thanks. --Yair rand (talk) 09:34, 17 September 2020 (UTC)

Hi Yair!

• yes, I was informed.
• no, WMF did not instruct me to not reveal the decision, but we worked together on how to get the message out. After all it also involved me giving leave at my previous job, etc.

Thanks. --DVrandecic (WMF) (talk) 19:01, 17 September 2020 (UTC)

James talkpage

Hello, I think it will be better we continue here rather than there. It's alright, we typically allow users to complain or even talk about topics tangentially relevant to their block. The reason why this is different is that the user in particular is blocked for disruption for discussions on the scowiki RFC, and in the meanwhile, they attempted to cause disruption to other similar discussions in which Abstract Wikipedia conversation is sort of similiar to the "other similiar discussions" they disrupted. In addition, they are taking our indulgence way too excessive, abusing talkapage privileges even more by repeating things they get blocked with. The admin team here on meta is close to revoking talk page access only until their global ban discussion took place, this caused us to be wiling to allow them to only participate in the discussion by their talkpage. I.e. their talkpage should be used only for global ban discussion (responses from them), nothing else. This is an unique situation, so I know it will be hard for you to understand if you didn't follow everything. No worries, sorry for the note (I know can be unpleasant) and thanks for your understanding. Regards,Camouflaged Mirage (talk) 15:46, 28 September 2020 (UTC)

@Camouflaged Mirage: Thank you for the additional explanation, and thank you for your understanding. Thanks for your work around keeping the community healthy, I truly appreciate it. --DVrandecic (WMF) (talk) 18:27, 28 September 2020 (UTC)

Hello from Commons

Danny I just learned about Abstract Wikipedia and it sounds like an interesting project. The problem how to store information about files and than display it in the language of the person viewing the page is something Wikimedia Commons community was working on for last 15 years. In the old days we mostly used Wikipedia templates which lead to some of the most complicated and unmaintainable codes I have ever encountered. Last few years, Lua and Wikidata changed the landscape a lot, making it much easier to do. Last decade or so I was writing and maintaining most of Commons high use infobox templates, and I am quite interested about your project and how it might help with some of out problems. Commons also might already have a code for a lot of your functions especially the ones related to description of artworks or artists. --Jarekt (talk) 23:46, 10 January 2021 (UTC)

Danny, congratulations, you succeeded to be the subject of an article in the most cited German news magazine ([1]). We met in 2012 at the Lotico CSW – The Berlin Semantic Web Meetup when you introduced Wikidata to the audience at the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin. Best, Thomas --ThT (talk) 17:12, 17 January 2021 (UTC)

Form Checker

Hi Denny,

I forked your formcheck code at https://github.com/WilliamAvery/formcheck and have made a few changes based on your To Do list. This includes fixing the SPARQL query to count forms that was timing out, and adding an input field to allow filtering of the lemmas in various ways (explanation here). I wonder whether you would like me to make any pull requests.

I did try contacting you using the email on your GitHub account, but I realise that may not have been a good idea.

Regards,

William Avery (talk) 23:39, 20 November 2022 (UTC)

Wow, Thank you!! Yes, I would have totally missed that email, I am notoriously bad with emails. Thank you!

The changes look great. I am happy to merge them if you send me a pull request. Thank you so much, it is really good to see this picked up!

Cheers, --DVrandecic (WMF) (talk) 01:25, 22 November 2022 (UTC)

No problem. I have submitted the pull request. I hope to have time to look at specifying an input to the function other than lemma later this week. William Avery (talk) 21:35, 22 November 2022 (UTC)

Hi again Denny,

I pushed a couple more changes. The edited version is published at https://williamavery.github.io/formcheck/ if you want to take a look.

William Avery (talk) 14:59, 1 December 2022 (UTC)

Thank you! Merged! Thank you for your great work! --DVrandecic (WMF) (talk) 21:45, 7 December 2022 (UTC)

Hi Denny,

It's me again. I have submitted a pull request for some more changes to formcheck.

I have done a little work on resetting fields if the user goes back and changes the language or part of speech.

I have put in a mechanism so that the list of functions is pulled from the wiki, but the only way to curate a set of functions seems to be to link to them in a page; there is no category or tagging system for functions. (Not yet?) I have used https://wikifunctions.beta.wmflabs.org/wiki/User:William_Avery/formcheck_functions to list the functions to make available, but you can obviously change that if you accept my code changes. I would be interested to know any ideas you have for further development, and I have one or two of my own.

Using the API, I found the process to get labels for functions, to put in the datalist, is quite involved. I wonder whether it would be useful to add an extension-specific facade to some of the existing core API query functionality, which would have an optional language parameter. It could then add a 'label' field (alongside pageid and title) to results generated by the core API, before returning them to the caller. Perhaps there are plans for that already, but it may be an area that somebody like myself could work on without complicating the development of the Wikifunctions core. William Avery (talk) 14:29, 1 May 2023 (UTC)

Thank you! As always, your changes are great! Thank you.

Those are great ideas! We don't yet have plans to add a language label to make the API more convenient. We eventually want to allow more powerful querying of the functions (by parameters etc.) but that is a bit down the line, unfortunately.

One small thing I noticed is that sometimes there are several forms for the same features (e.g. L992206-F2), and it probably is enough if only one of them is fine. I would have no idea how to implement that - I don't think it fits neatly in the current workflow. Honestly, probably better to leave that as is. :D -- DVrandecic (WMF) (talk) 00:25, 21 July 2023 (UTC)