Wikidata and its web of interconnected items lends itself to automated clustering. I have used my Wikidata query tool to quickly (as in, a few minutes) check all clusters of humans, that is, items about humans connected by properties such as mother, child, spouse, brother, etc. At the time of writing, there are 11,784 clusters […]
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Two weeks after releasing the first version of The Wikidata Game, I feel a quick look at the progress is in order. First, thank you everyone for trying, playing, and feedback! The response has been overwhelming; sometimes quite literally so, thus I ask your forgiveness if I can’t quite keep up with the many suggestions […]
Gamification. One of those horrible buzzwords that are thrown around by everyone these days, between “cloud computing” and “the internet of things” (as opposed to the internet of people fitted with ethernet jacks, or those who get a good WiFi signal on their tooth fillings). Sure enough, gamification in the Wiki-verse has not been met […]
So I was recently blocked on Wikidata. That was one day after I passed a quarter million edits there. These two events are related, in an odd way. I have been using one of my tools to perform some rudimentary mass-adding of information; specifically, the tool was adding “instance of:human” to all Wikidata items in […]
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I am running a lot of tools on Labs. As with most software, the majority of feedback I get for those tools falls into one of two categories: bug reports and feature requests, the latter often in the form “can the tool get input from/filter on/output to…”. In many cases, that is quick to implement; […]
Tuesday, February 11, 2014
Now that I got Shakespeare out of the way, I picked up chatter (as they say in the post-Snowden world) about the BEACON format again, which seemed to have fallen quiet for a while. In short, BEACON is a simple text format linking two items in different catalogs, usually web sites. There are many examples […]
Gerard has blogged tirelessly about improvements to Reasonator, my attempt at making Wikidata a little more accessible. Encouraged by constant feedback, suggestions, and increasing view numbers, it has grown from “that thing that shows biography data” into a versatile and, more importantly, useful view of Wikidata. This is my attempt at a summary of the […]
Tuesday, December 10, 2013
Wikidata continues to grow. The growth is not in the number of items (which are roughly limited by the total number of Wikipedia articles at the moment) but in labels for different languages and, of course, statements. These statements are supplied by two groups of editors: the bots, adding vast numbers of statements based on programmatically […]
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Wednesday, November 6, 2013
As Gerard has so eloquently described, over 60% of Wikidata items have no corresponding article in the English Wikipedia; once we leave the “top five”, this exceeds 90%. The shoot-from-the-hip response would be: write more articles! While there is no issue in principle with this approach, it might not scale well, even with all our volunteers. […]
Tuesday, October 29, 2013
Sven Manguard has written a fantastic op-ed for the one-year anniversary of Wikidata opening its gates to the data flood. In his outlook for the near future, he writes: Several users have already created tools that approximate queries in certain cases, but there’s no substitute for the real thing. As mentioned above, the ability to […]