Wikidata, instance of and subclass of through time (P31 & P279)
Last month I looked at all Wikimedia Commons revisions and managed to generate some data and graphs for the usage of depicts statements since they were introduced on the project. This month, I have applied the same analysis on Wikidata but looking at instance of and subclasses of items. A slightly bigger data set, however…
What is Wikibase “Federated Properties” in 2025
I recently wrote a post looking at the history of the Wikibase “Federated Properties” feature. While at Wikimania 2025 the topic of federation came up a few times, particularly given the current discussions ongoing on the Wikidata project chat page including discussions about wikicite, and the recent Wikidata graph split. All the code for the…
What was Wikibase “Federated Properties”
The “Federated Properties” feature allows / allowed a local Wikibase instance to access and utilise properties directly from a remote Wikibase, primarily Wikidata. Its primary purpose is to enable partial federation between a local Wikibase and Wikidata, broadening the base of available data without needing to create a property set from scratch. I’m split between…
Wikimedia Commons Depicts statements over time
Wikimedia Commons now uses Structured Data on Commons (SDC) to make media information multilingual and machine-readable. A core part of SDC is the ‘depicts’ statement (P180), which identifies items clearly visible in a file. Depicts statements are crucial for MediaSearch, enabling it to find relevant results in any language by using Wikidata labels, as well…
WikiCrowd for 2025
I wrote the first version of WikiCrowd back in 2022 and haven’t really iterated on it much since, beyond adding the odd new set of image categories, and removing features that I decided were not optimum. At the 2025 Wikimedia Hackathon however, WikiCrowd came up as both an entertaining little game to show people during…
Wikidata Map in 2024
Another year on from the last generation of the Wikidata map, @tarrow and @outdooracorn spent some time in preparation for the Wikidata birthday to prepare a new map (see git commits). The latest images have already been uploaded to Wikimedia Commons, and appear in the Wikidata map commons gallery. In this post, I’ll have a…
Visualizing Wikibase connections, using wikibase.world queries
Over the past week I have spent some time writing some code to start running a little bot on the wikibase.world project, aimed at expanding the number of Wikibases that are collected there, and automating collection of some of the data that can easily be automated. Over the past week, the bot has imported 650…
2 years of wikibase.cloud by WMDE
It’s been somewhere between 2 and 3 years since WMDE took over WBStack, turned it into wikibase.cloud. During this time, my techy focus has slowly shifted away from the world of Wikibase, though I still enjoy following along and working on other Wikimedia areas. Here I will ramble on about what I saw in terms…
Wikibase: What is an entity?
I left the Wikidata and Wikibase teams roughly a year ago, and at the time there were some long and deep discussions going on inside the team trying to define what an entity was, and what should and should not be an entity. At the recent Hackathon in Tallinn, this topic resurfaced to me, as…
Review & Removal of Wikidata query service Blazegraph JNL on Cloudflare R2
Back in August, I uploaded a new Wikidata query service Blazegraph JNL file to both Cloudflare and the Internet Archive. 4 months on, it is time for me to remove the R2 version of this file, which is costing me around 18 USD per month to store, and fall back to the Internet Archive version…