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Weather Observations of the Meteorological Service of Canada in Wikimedia Projects

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A project of Wikimedia Canada to transfer observations from Meteorological Service of Canada (MSC) weather stations to various Wikimedia projects.

Diagram explaining how it is possible to import Environment Canada data into Wikimedia projects (Wikidata, Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons, etc.).

Commons

Wikipedia

  • Code Lua
  • Documentation
    • How to use data on Wikipedia
    • How to do Lua calculation on the Wikipedia side
    • Make a request to Wikidata to retrieve information in a Wikimedia project?

Wikidata

  • Metadata of stations already in Wikidata. See WikiProject Weather observations.
  • Add the URLs of the observation files in Commons for each of the stations.
  • Documentation:
    • SPARQL query to retrieve observation URLs according to: stations, time period, type of observation (hourly, daily, monthly, climatic)

Optional

Add climate data (records) into the corresponding stations entries. See for example the Minimum Record Temperature on Doucet. It would be possible to build on the functions of WikiProject Weather Observations to generalize and create the code in QS to add different records. It should be ensured that there is a property for each climate file entry. The code should enter the station's CSV climate file, as well as the queries file of all existing entries to update only when there is a change.

Planning

Risks

  • Bulk import of pages into Commons, community acceptance
  • Possible code break in LUA models in the coming years

Phase 1 (2019-2020)

  • Importing Environment Canada Data into Commons
  • Link Wikidata pages in Commons
  • Implement the categorization of pages containing data in JSON

Phase 2 (2020-2021)

  • Reuse of Commons data in a Wikipedia template
  • View data in Wikipedia pages

Long-term maintenance operations

  • Updating station elements in Wikidata
  • Updating station data in Commons
  • Updating LUA code for Wikipedia templates based on platform changes

Participants