Recently some articles appeared on the English Wikipedia Signpost about Wikidata (1, 2, 3). Reading these articles, especially the second and third, pushed me to try to make a dent in the ‘problem’ of references on Wikidata. It turns out that this is actually not that hard!
Wikidata
Myanmar coordinates on Wikidata by Lockal & Widar
In a recent blog post I showed the amazing apparent effect that Wikimania’s location had on the coordinate location data in Mexico on Wikidata. A comment on the post by Finn Årup Nielsen pointed out a massive increase in data in the Myanmar (Burma). I had previously spotted this increase but chosen not to mention it in the post. But now after a quick look at some items and edit histories I have found who we have to thank!
The increase in geo coordinate information around the region can clearly be seen in the image above. As with the Mexico comparison this shows the difference between June and October 2015.
Impact of Wikimania Mexico 2015 on Wikidata
Recently Wikidata celebrated its third birthday. For the occasion I ran the map generation script that I have talked about before again to see what had changed in the geo coordinate landscape of Wikidata! I found, well, Mexico blossomed! The image to the left is from June 2015, the right October 2015 and Wikimania was … Read more
WMUK training event Wikidata presentation
In 2015 I attended another WMUK Wikidata training event. Below you can find the presentation that I used, created using slides.com.
Un-deleting 500,000 Wikidata items
Since some time in January of this year I have been on a mission to un-delete all Wikidata items that were merged into other items before the redirect functionality of Wikidata existed. Finally I am done (well nearly). This is the short story… Reasoning Earlier this year I pointed out the importance of redirects on … Read more
Wikimedia Grafana graphs of Wikidata profiling information
I recently discovered the Wikimedia Grafana instance. After poking it for a little while here are some slightly interesting graphs that I managed to extract.
Axel Springer Hack Day Presentation
During 2015 I attended another Axel Springer Hack Day similar to the one in 2014, with Wikidata being one of the APIs that was presented. The presentation can be seen below:
Barack Obama GeneaWiki, 1 year later
GeneaWiki is a tool created by Magnus Manske to visualize the family of a person using data pulled from Wikidata. I used the GeneaWiki tool as an example use of Wikidata in a presentation a year ago (2014) and below you can see the screenshot I took from it. It shows 10 people in Barack Obamas … Read more
Review of the big Interwiki link migration
Wikidata 
was launched on 30 October 2012 and was the first new project of the Wikimedia Foundation since 2006. The first phase enabled items to be created and filled with basic information: a label – a name or title, aliases – alternative terms for the label, a description, and links to articles about the topic in all the various language editions of Wikipedia.
On 14 January 2013, the Hungarian Wikipedia became the first to enable the provision of interlanguage links via Wikidata. This functionality was slowly enabled on more sites until it was enabled on all Wikipedias on the 6th March.
The side bar that these interlanguage links are used to generate can be seen to the right.
Wikidata Map – 19 months on
The last Wikidata map generation, as last discussed here and as originally created by Denny Vrandečić was on the 7th of November 2013. Recently I have started rewriting the code that generates the maps, stored on github, and boom, a new map! The old code The old version of the wikidata-analysis repo, which generated the maps (along with other … Read more