WELCOME TO OUR WIKI SHOWCASE!

• 11:30am to 12:45pm – WIKIDATA SHOWCASE (Pentland West).
• Navino Evans, Wikidata Volunteer and Co-founder of Histropedia.
• Ewan McAndrew, Wikimedian at Edinburgh University.
• 2.15pm to 3pm – WIKIDATA – ADVANCED QUERY WORKSHOP (Holyrood).
• Navino Evans, Wikidata Volunteer and Co-founder of Histropedia.
• Ewan McAndrew, Wikimedian at Edinburgh University.

Please create an account on Wikidata

https://www.wikidata.org

Wikidata

The free and open knowledge base

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Repo Fringe 2016

Ewan McAndrew - @emcandre

Navino Evans - @NavinoEvans

Link to presentation

http://tinyurl.com/gtc7o2p

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Google had its own free and open knowledge base… Freebase

Google sunsets Freebase – its own structured data repository.

This means that Google’s ‘Knowledge Graph’ is now powered, not exclusively but ever increasingly, by Wikidata.

“The primary issue with Google’s knowledge panels is that they aren’t terribly knowledgeable: They provide information but often leave out any context on where that information came from….”

Caitlin Dewey, The Washington Post – 11 May 2016

The need for digital provenance

“Since Google frequently does not cite its sources…. there’s no way for users to double-check “answers” for bias or error, which doubtlessly exist.”

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Caitlin Dewey, The Washington Post – 11 May 2016

Wikidata – the new Rosetta Stone

“Data is beautiful. Data is information.”

Wikidata

Wikidata is a free linked database of knowledge that can be read and edited by both humans and machines.

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Wikidata acts as central storage for the structured data of its Wikimedia sister projects including Wikipedia, Wikivoyage, Wikisource, and others.

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• repository of the world's knowledge
• database anyone can read and edit
• multi-lingual
• designed to deal with the reality Wikipedia has to deal with
• free and open source software.
• All data on Wikidata is CC-0 licenced.

What is Wikidata actually?

English Wikipedia “only includes only includes 30% of the items entered in the other 287 languages.”*

“The promise of linked open data seems to have finally arrived.”

a powerful machine-

readable dictionary

a powerful machine-

readable dictionary

picture by Ealgyth

Example Wikidata item & statement

wikidata.org/wiki/Q42

Douglas Adams

The Map (2014)

8 January 1947

David Bowie (Q5383)

date of birth (P569)

9,747,355

according to: Statistics Sweden

method: estimation

point in time: 31 Dec 2014

picture by Hector Melo A.

Sweden (Q34)

population (P1082)

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48°51‘30"N

2°17‘40"E

picture by Wladyslaw

The Eiffel Tower (Q243)

coordinate location (P625)

All available DataTypes

• Item
• String
• Time
• Globe co-ordinate
• URL
• Quantity

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Datatypes are used in statements to represent data

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• Commons media
• Monolingual text
• External identifier
• Property
• Mathematical expression

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See wikidata.org/wiki/Special:ListDatatypes

Wikidata key stats – data and community

Offical Wikidata stats | Third party stats tool | 2015/2016 progress report

• 38,7 million items
• 100 million statements

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• 595,6 million edits
• 16,500 active editors

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Growth of statements and references since launch

Date retrieved 18st Nov 2017

The Map (2014)

Blog post about how these images are made

The Map (2015)

See image on Commons

The Map (2016)

See image on Commons

What all this Linked Data means….

• Using Wikidata we can now query Wikipedia as never before.

e.g. Show me all the architects with UK Citizenship grouped by place of education.

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• The Wikidata game gamifies the experience of adding an item to improve Wikidata a little at a time, simply & easily.

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• Inventaire builds on Wikidata by allowing people to share their favourite books, thereby adding to the open knowledge on books & authors.

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• The BFI, MOMA and Ted Talks are all now migrating their data to Wikidata. Finnish broadcaster YLE are also migrating their data to Wikidata.

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Mona Lisa – Wikidata item Q12418

Identifiers.

List of paintings by Jacob van Ruisdael�(Part of Sum of All Paintings project)

“First task is to use Metadata for 3000 images from the Welsh Landscape collection, which are available on Wikimedia Commons, to create detailed linked data……

then work with the Library and volunteers in the Wikidata community to explore new ways of exploring and analysing the data and associated images.”

National Library of Wales have a Wikidata Visiting Scholar. A world first.

Crotos – The Welsh Landscape Collection

SPARQL endpoint for querying Wikidata

Who’s birthday is today?

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Useful links

Wikidata Query Service Beta – Official query service

SPARQL Query Examples

WDQ – Third party query service which is simple to learn

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People born on this day →

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List of countries ordered by the number of their cities with female mayor →

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Children of Genghis Khan →

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Practical session – Let’s improve Wikidata!

What are we doing?

Adding some missing data to Wikidata items for ‘Women who were educated at Edinburgh University’

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What data to add?

Our practical session will focus on adding the place of birth (P19)

Practical session – Instructions

Adding birth locations (P19)

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List of items with missing birth place →

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Finding the data

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• Click on link above and click “run” when you arrive on the page
• Click on Wikidata link for any item (rightmost column in results)
• Click on link to the Wikipedia article (from Wikidata item page)
• Find the birth location (if present) – use the most precise location you can find (e.g. choose an area within a city over the city itself)
• Go back to your Wikidata item page

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Adding the statement

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• Scroll to bottom of the page and click “+ add”
• Type “place of birth” in the “property” box
• In the box to the right, type in the location and select from the dropdown results
• Click save to add the statement to the item

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How to get data from Wikidata

• Data dump

Large scale download/processing of data

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• API

Get data on individual or small groups of items

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• SPARQL endpoint

Run advanced queries

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See main data access page for a complete overview

Example Applications

All generated using the data stored in Wikidata

https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Tools/External_tools

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Reasonator

tools.wmflabs.org/reasonator/?q=Q76

Wikidata tempo-spatial display

tools.wmflabs.org/wikidata-todo/tempo_spatial_display.html?q=Q12551

Ask Platypus

askplatyp.us

ConceptMap

http://conceptmap.cfapps.io/?items=Q1339,Q1862395,Q36834,Q1444,Q81982,Q901207,Q52954,Q80284,Q75464&lang=en

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Inventory

Histropedia

histropedia.com/timeline/5bnj79bjyr/Artists

Visualising results from practical

On the Wikidata Query Service…

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Women educated at Uni of Edinburgh query

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Multiple visualisations available after loading and clicking run

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On the Histropedia Query Timeline app,

using the Wikidata Query Service…

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Colour coded by place of birth (P19)

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Colour coded by country of Citizenship (P27)

Same colour code, but including men

In Japanese, with fallback of Arabic, Russian, then English

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THANKS FOR LISTENING – ANY QUESTIONS?

Links and further reading

Developer links

#wikidata on chat.freenode.net

wikidata-l@lists.wikimedia.org

Wikidata – The New Rosetta Stone (article).

Google closes Freebase (article).

Google’s sketchy attempt to control the world’s knowledge (article).

api @ wikidata.org/w/api.php

sandbox @ wikidata.org/wiki/Special:ApiSandbox

The Wikidata Game: https://tools.wmflabs.org/wikidata-game/distributed/

PHP

Wikibase API Library: github.com/addwiki/wikibase-api

SPARQL abstraction: github.com/Benestar/asparagus

Python

Wiki bot Framework: mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Pywikibot/Wikidata

C# .NET

Wikibase API Library: github.com/Benestar/wikibase.net

WANT MORE WIKIDATA?�

Join us later for the Wikidata Advanced Query Workshop at 2.15pm

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• 2.15pm to 3pm – WIKIDATA – ADVANCED QUERY WORKSHOP (Holyrood).
• Navino Evans, Wikidata Volunteer and Co-founder of Histropedia.
• Ewan McAndrew, Wikimedian at Edinburgh University.