Since a few years, I run the WikiData Query tool (WDQ) to provide a query functionality to Wikidata. Nowadays, the (confusingly similarly named) SPARQL-based WDQS is the “official” way to query Wikidata. WDQS has been improving a lot, and while some of my tools still support WDQ, I deliberately left that option out of new […]
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For a while now, Wikimedia pages (usually, Wikipedia articles) have a “page image”, an image from that page used as a thumbnail in article previews, e.g. in the mobile app. While it is not entirely clear to me how this is image is chosen, it appears to be the first image of the article in […]
Images and their use in the WikiVerse have always been a particular interest of mine, on Wikipedia, Commons, and of course, Wikidata. Commons holds the files and groups them by subject, author, or theme; Wikidata references images and files for key aspects of a subject; and Wikipedia uses them to enrich texts, and puts files […]
CatScan is one of these workhorse tools that are familiar to many Wikimedia users, all the way back to the toolserver. Its popularity, however, has also caused problems with reliability time and again. As Labs became usable, I added QuickIntersection to the mix, allowing for a quicker and more reliable service at the expense of […]
Wednesday, January 6, 2016
In a recent Wikipedia Signpost Op-Ed, Andreas Kolbe wrote about Wikidata and references. He comes to the conclusion that Wikidata needs more (non-Wikipedia) references, a statement I wholeheartedly agree with. He also divines that this will never happen, that Wikidata is doomed, while at the same time somehow being controlled by Google and Microsoft; I […]
Tuesday, October 13, 2015
The Wikidata Game has been a success, both in terms of work done, as well as a demonstration of micro-contributions to Wikidata. I consider ~2,500 players not a trivial thing, considering the games are neither particularly thrilling, nor resulting in awards (how about one repercussion-free vandalism on English Wikipedia for 1,000 actions in a sub-game?). […]
Thursday, September 24, 2015
Wikipedians love lists. Thus, my list-generating bot is now active on over a dozen wikis, most of then upon request by users, who have set up quite a variety of lists to generate and update. However, a few issues with this approach have emerged. Some of them are technical; lists get too long for wikitext, […]
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Do you know what “Stomatitis” is? Neither did I. But there is an article about it on German Wikipedia, and when I found it, it had a blank Wikidata item. Now, I happen to speak German, but I have run into plenty of other blank items with, say, a Russian Wikipedia article, which is not […]
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I have previously blogged about Wikipedia-related page lists, and how they relate to many tools and activities. I also lamented my previous, failed attempts at introducing a “tool pipeline system”. Well, I am not one to give up easily! The latest, greatest iteration in this vein is PagePile. Essentially, this new tool is managing piles […]
While I do occasionally write Wikimedia tools “to order”, I wrote quite a few of them because I required (or just enjoyed) the functionality myself. One thing I like to do is adding images to Wikidata, using WD-FIST. Recently, I started to focus on a specific list, people with awards (of any kind). People with […]