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Category Archives: Wikimedia

Evacuation

Thursday, July 3, 2014

Wikimedia Commons is a great project. Over 21 million freely licensed files speak a clear language. But, like all projects of such a magnitude, there are some issues that somewhat dampen the joy. The major source of conflict is the duality of Commons: on one hand, it is a stand-alone repository of free files; on […]

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The Games Continue

Tuesday, June 3, 2014

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 […]

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The Game Is On

Tuesday, May 20, 2014

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 […]

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Post scriptum

Thursday, April 10, 2014

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; […]

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Points of view

Monday, February 17, 2014

For many years, Henrik has single-handedly (based on data by Domas) done what the world’s top 5 website has consistently failed to provide: Page view information, per page, per month/day. Requested many times, repeatedly promised, page view data has remained proverbial vaporware, the Duke Nukem Forever of the Wikimedia Foundation (except DNF was delivered in […]

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Modest doubt is called the BEACON of the wise

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 […]

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The Reason For It All

Friday, January 31, 2014

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 […]

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Wikidata, or: Wikipedia, the other 60%

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. […]

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Birthday lists

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 […]

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Wikidata Query

Tuesday, September 17, 2013

With over 13 million items, Wikidata is a vast repository of human- and machine-readable data, and with over 70 million edits in the last 11 month, its value as a data repository is growing fast. Much of that value is stored in statements about items, and the connections between items. 42 might take a while […]

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