Wikidata and Big Data at UVA
How do you describe things? Consider what you’re reading right now. Is this a blog post? Is it an article? Is it just a collection of sentences? Or is it a series of thoughts? I recently wrapped up a successful machine learning project as part of a capstone project at the School Data Science at … Continued
Comic book data on Wikidata: Graphic Possibilities at Michigan State
In April 2021 I was invited to give a talk at the Graphic Possibilities Research Workshop (GPRW) in the Department of English at Michigan State University. The GPRW has an extensive collection of comic books, with more than 50,000 records starting in 1888. The aim of this workshop is to engage subject area experts with the goal … Continued
Wikipedia lists on Wikidata
Have you ever come across a Wikidata item that looks like this: List of Nobel laureates in Physics? You notice the word “list” in the label of the item and you get excited to see a list of laureates on the page. But as you scroll, you find there is no list. There is just a … Continued
School data for the world
There are many different ways to contribute to Wikidata. Some of these ways involve manual edits, batch edits, and edits with tools. There are hundreds of Wikidata tools that serve many different purposes. One particularly useful tool is called Cradle. Cradle is a form-based tool users fill out to generate new Wikidata items. Forms are user-generated and are … Continued
Happy 8th birthday, Wikidata!
Wikidata is 8! Let’s celebrate! In eight short years Wikidata has grown from a central repository for all language versions of Wikipedia, to an increasingly essential fixture of the internet. Wikidata endeavors to represent the world’s knowledge as linked data. Linked data is the connective tissue that brings life and context to concepts, web pages, … Continued
10 years of learning to engage experts
This fall, we’re celebrating the 10th anniversary of the Wikipedia Student Program with a series of blog posts telling the story of the program in the United States and Canada. Saying that Wikipedia has changed a lot over the past ten years is an understatement. One of the ways that Wikipedia has changed the most … Continued
Modeling wrongful convictions on Wikidata
Wikidata continues to play a more central role on the internet by supplying digital assistants like Siri and Alex with facts. Amplifying Wikidata’s facts through these digital assistants has implications for discovering new ideas, answering questions, and representing history accurately. In a recent Wikidata course, this exact concern came up in the area of criminal … Continued
Wikidata reveals new insights about SFMOMA’s exhibition data
Art museums are not only stewards of data about their collection but also of data from other museums. All of this data can tell the story of art, art movements, and the creators of these artworks. In January I followed up with some of our Wikidata course participants at SFMOMA. I met with Ian Gill, … Continued
Wikidata at the Art Institute of Chicago
As a museum-goer, do you ever think about how art museums keep track of their collections? What do they know about the artists that made the art? What do they know about their collection as a whole? How can a museum answer questions about the gender breakdown of the artists in the collections? How can … Continued
Catering to diverse GLAM needs to improve Wikidata
The Wikidata courses that wrapped up in December made for our largest group of new Wikidata trainees so far. After six quick weeks, we covered a lot of ground — from property proposals to taxonomic grouping of Wikidata’s Q-items (What does this mean? Take a look at this tool to see how groups of people, … Continued