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Category Archives: Wikimedia

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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Autodesc

Monday, September 9, 2013

Wikidata offers multilingual labels for items. Since many items will have the same label with, or even across, languages, one can also add a brief description for an item in each language, to quickly disambiguate between them. Such descriptions are helpful in searches, and essential when adding claims linking to other items. However, many items […]

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How to nip a budding project

Wednesday, August 21, 2013

Wikidata is booming. A huge number of editors, many of them new contributors to the Wonderful World of Wikimedia projects, are adding, fixing, and sourcing claims to the database. A ridiculously high amount of language links have been moved from Wikipedia to Wikidata. Part of the promise of this new project is to unify factoids […]

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In the pipeline

Wednesday, August 1, 2012

Over the years, the toolserver, mostly organised and financed by Wikimedia Deutschland, has become an invaluable asset to many Wikimedia projects. However, the open access policy of the toolserver, which enabled many volunteers to write helpful tools, comes at a price. Most tools are “stand-alone”; they perform a single function, and the results are usually a […]

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