Celtic Knot Conference 2020/Submissions/Wikidata and how you can use it to support minority languages/Discussions

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✨⏯️ Session details

• Name: Wikidata and how you can use it to support minority languages
• Speaker: Mohammed Sadat (WMDE)
• Link to the video/replay: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wfhkk4qdkTE
• More details: Celtic Knot Conference 2020/Submissions/Wikidata and how you can use it to support minority languages
• See also: Wikidata helpdesk Celtic Knot Conference 2020/Wikidata helpdesk

💬❓ Questions

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Who outside wikipedia uses Wikidata? (Antiqueight)

• Google data panels on the right-hand side of search results are Wikidata based, iirc
  • Ooh! Thank you.
• Plenty of institutions, external tools, companies... for example, national libraries like BNF and GND started aligning their data with Wikidata and providing Wikidata Q-IDs as identifiers for their content
• Ok Google/Siri/Alexa, almost all vocal assistants (including an opensource one, Mycroft)
• BBC, UK Parliament data team, OpenStreetMap, Lufthansa, DBLP
• Sunlight Foundation was scraping article infobox information before wikidata

So, if you need to include a number which will change over time, adding the property [on Wikipedia] means that wikidata updates will ensure the number is kept current without people having to specifically edit the page? (Antiqueight)

(I assumed that you were talking about including data from Wikidata in a Wikipedia article) Yes, absolutely, and that's why including Wikidata's data is so powerful, especially for small communities: data will be stored only in one place (on Wikidata) and automatically updated on the Wikipedia pages that reuse it. (Léa)

🖊️🔗 Collaborative note-taking

Feel free to take notes about the session here, add some useful links, etc.
Slides: File:Wikidata and how you can use it to support minority languages - Celtic Knot 2020 - Mohammed Sadat Abdulai (WMDE).pdf

• [Intro to Wikidata]
• Originally created to solve the problem of the lack of structure in text-based Wikipedia articles. Most content is scholarly articles now. Wikidata has become so big and successful that its data is used more widely outside the WIkimedia projects than within.
• Data is structured, where each item's statement links to another item, such as San Francisco (Q62) mayor (P6) is Gavin Newsom (Q461391)
• Wikidata can handle disambiguation between people, with several statements that can help disambiguate people — gender, country of citizenship, vital dates and so on.
• Items may have multiple statements for the same property — Douglas Adams (Q42) was educated at (P69) St Johns College (Q691283) and Brentwood School (Q4961791)
• The data model is not language-specific. Wikidata stores an item ID, such as Q2, which is translated to Earth (en), Erde (de), An Domhan (ga), Y Ddaear (cy)
• Wikidata Terminator shows you the list of items missing label and/or description in a language new URL: https://wikidata-terminator.toolforge.org/
• Infoboxes can be populated from Wikidata, this reduced workload for volunteers, allowing editors to focus on more valuable (more human-needing) work. Edit links on infoboxes send editors to the appropriate Wikidata statement.
• The project Wikidata Bridge (https://www.mediaiki.org/wiki/Wikidata_Bridge ) will make it easier for people to edit Wikidata directly from Wikipedia.
• Data can be embedded directly using , placing the value of a statement directly into a Wikipedia article. This is particularly useful for population stats, for example.
• There's a galaxy of tools available to add, query, watch and reuse data [see slide and https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Tools] http://histropedia.com/ https://inventaire.io etc.
• The Wikidata Game finds potential actions and has buttons to accept or reject the offered data; this is particularly useful for languages with gaps in their data - https://wikidata-game.toolforge.org/distributed/
• Reasonator gives a more-Wikipedia-like interface to Wikidata, which is very useful for articles missing in your own language, but populated in Wikidata: https://reasonator.toolforge.org/v2/#/Q42
• Crotos: search and display engine for visual artworks, allowing both search querying and contribution of new information [did I get that right?] - http://zone47.com/crotos/
  • There is also a Welsh-language version: http://zone47.com/crotos/dwynwen/cosmos/?f=195
• Lexicographical data has more recently been added to Wikidata, describing words and phrases in different languages — this should be useful for dictionaries, translation tools and games
• [More information slide]
• See also related sessions:
  • Wikidata-powered infoboxes: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Celtic_Knot_Conference_2020/Submissions/Wikidata-powered_infoboxes
  • Hands on Wikidata and lexicographical data: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Celtic_Knot_Conference_2020/Submissions/Hands-on_Wikidata_and_lexicographical_data
  • Sámi placenames on Wikidata: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Celtic_Knot_Conference_2020/Submissions/S%C3%A1mi_placenames_on_Wikidata
• Subscribe to Wikidata newsletter: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Status_updates
• Discussions on Wikidata on Project Chat: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Project_chat

Q&A and Discussion (see Qs above)

• One useful thing about Wikidata-powered infoboxes is that an update on Wikidata will ripple out to all the different-language Wikipedias, so everywhere will be up-to-date when there is a new President of Ireland, for example.
• Rebecca: Do you have a favourite Wikidata tool?
  • Listeriabot: https://listeria.toolforge.org (thank you Léa in YouTube chat!)
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Ghana/Parliament_of_Ghana/Members_of_the_5th_Parliament_of_the_4th_Republic_of_Ghana
  • Listeria example (created by Wikidata SPARQL query): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Stinglehammer/Women_educated_at_Edinburgh_University_without_an_article
  • Women in Red was an early adopter of this and it streamlined their workflow
    • for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Women_in_Red/Missing_articles_by_occupation/University_teachers
  • wdedit=yes allows the Listeria table to be editable so you can add values to Wikidata direct from the table without having to go to the Wikidata item page. (seems to work better in Mozilla Firefox).
• (@Luistxo (Tw)Basque user): we currently using Wikidata to feed thousands of questions in a trivia quizz app (Egunean Behin https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.codesyntax.eguneanbehin). Some explanation... in Basque: https://wikimedia.eus/2020/02/wikidata-eta-wikipediaren-erabilpena-egunean-behin-jokoan/ || Currently having some contacts in Wales to develop a Welsh version of the app game.

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