1 of 10

Wikidata for Wizards�Navino Evans and Simon Cobb

Wikimania 2022 UK Community Festival

Friday August 12, 2022

2 of 10

Wikidata for Wizards

Wikidata is a free and open knowledge base that has grown from the centralised repository to provide dynamic content to the Wikimedia ecosystem and has become an integral part of the Linked Open Data cloud. Being broad in scope, huge (and still expanding rapidly) and highly interconnected, it is a rich data source for humans and machines to draw upon. The Wikidata Query Service is a powerful tool that enables the discovery and retrieval of relevant data, with built-in visualisation options to make the results informative.

In this session, we will focus on the aspects of SPARQL and the Wikidata Query Service that are essential to know to progress beyond the basics of queries. Whilst prior knowledge would be beneficial, all are welcome to join us and try the example queries as we use extended syntax to explore the data model, demonstrate how to utilise third-party tools and share tips about our favourite visualisations and features.

3 of 10

Wikidata Query Service

Skills
Using third party tools
Visualisations
Wikidata, Wikibase and WMF projects

4 of 10

Skills

Statement nodes

Access qualifiers, references and other data connected to a statement

Population of UK and US wdt: query vs p: quer y (shows multiple rows issue)
p: query with additional data
Use the RDF data model to see which connection to use

Ranks, no value claims

Working with statements of different ranks or “no value” claims

Query

GROUP BY

Aggregate data with counting, averages, concatenation and more. Also essential when you need to remove multiple rows for the same item.

5 of 10

Items with P3120 statement

P3120 property documentation
Most statements – https://w.wiki/5Z8f
Most external identifiers – https://w.wiki/5Z8i
No English Wikipedia sitelink – https://w.wiki/5Z8c
Frequent WikibaseItem type properties – https://w.wiki/5Z8n
Frequent External ID properties – https://w.wiki/5Z8q

6 of 10

Cool visualisations

Map with clustering - Thatched roof buildings
Map with Geoshapes - Populations of countries
Map with Geoshapes - UK railway network
Graph - Connections to Shelly’s Guitar
Animated bar chart - Earthquakes per year per continent
Auto location - Drinking establishments near me
Image grid - Cocktail recipes
Wikimedia API - Film release vs Wikipedia article creation dates
Timeline - Discovery of the Chemical elements

7 of 10

Third party tools

Histropedia (main site & Query Timeline tool)

Petscan - https://petscan.wmflabs.org/
TABernacle (with this data loaded https://w.wiki/mik)
WikiShootMe - https://wikishootme.toolforge.org/
Wikidata Free Image Search Tool (FIST) - https://fist.toolforge.org/wdfist/index.html
Wiki tools for Google Sheets

8 of 10

Wikimedia ecosystem & beyond

Wikibase - https://tinyurl.com/2f9thcp3
Commons query - https://w.wiki/5ZMN
ONS federated query - https://w.wiki/5Yw3
LOD cloud - https://lod-cloud.net/

9 of 10

Exploring Wikidata

Triples - https://w.wiki/5Z8y
Datatypes - https://w.wiki/f7y
Property count - https://w.wiki/3Td
Property classification - https://w.wiki/f7w
Class constraint count for ExternalID properties - https://w.wiki/uWJ