COVID-19 Wikipedia pageview spikes, 2019-2022
Back in 2019 at the start of the COVID-19 outbreak, Wikipedia saw large spikes in page views on COVID-19 related topics while people here hunting for information. I briefly looked at some of the spikes in March 2020 using the easy-to-use pageview tool for Wikimedia sites. But the problem with viewing the spikes through this…
Wikidata ontological tree of Trains
While looking working on my recent WikiCrowd project I ended up looking at the ontological tree of both Wikidata entities and Wikimedia Commons categories. In this post, I’ll look at some of the ontology mappings that happen between projects, some of the SPARQL that can help you use this ontology in tools, and also some…
How can I get data on all the dams in the world? Use Wikidata
During my first week at Newspeak house while explaining Wikidata and Wikibase to some folks on the terrace the topic of Dams came up while discussing an old project that someone had worked on. Back in the day collecting information about Dams would have been quite an effort, compiling a bunch of different data from…
Using OpenRefine with Wikidata for the first time
I have long known about OpenRefine (previously Google Refine) which is a tool for working with data, manipulating and cleaning it. As of version 3.0 (May 2018), OpenRefine included a Wikidata extension, allowing for extra reconciliation and also editing of Wikidata directly (as far as I understand it). You can find some documentation on this…
Your own Wikidata Query Service, with no limits
The Wikidata Query Service allows anyone to use SPARQL to query the continuously evolving data contained within the Wikidata project, currently standing at nearly 65 millions data items (concepts) and over 7000 properties, which translates to roughly 8.4 billion triples. You can find a great write up introducing SPARQL, Wikidata, the query service and what…
Geospatial search for Wikidata Query Service
Geospatial search is up and running for the Wikidata Query Service! This allows you to search for items with coordinates that are located within a certain radius or within a bounding box. Along side the the map that can be used to display results for the query service this really is a great tool for…
Building applications around Wikidata (a beer example)
Wikidata provides free and open access to entities representing real world concepts. Of course Wikidata is not meant to contain every kind of data, for example beer reviews or product reviews would probably never make it into Wikidata items. However creating an app that is powered by Wikidata & Wikibase to contain beer reviews should be…