GLAM/Newsletter/March 2020/Contents/Wikidata report

This Month in GLAM – Volume X, Issue III, March 2020

Wikidata report

Lockdown Levellings

By Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing)

Note: A major database corruption hit Wikidata on 6 April, also affecting connected sister projects such as Wikipedia. A fix has been implemented, but it may take a day or two for things to get back to normal, especially for logged-out users.

Special Report: COVID-19

Wikidata meetups, including all those funded by Wikimedia Foundation grants, have been cancelled, or moved online, for the foreseeable future.

Wikidata's WikiProject COVID-19 is up and running. Wikidata already has a large volume of relevant data. Wikidata Queries around the SARS-CoV-2 virus and pandemic is a free eBook to facilitate their use.

News

New help page: Suggesters and selectors
EqualStreetNames.Brussels shows streets in Brussels named after men and women, visualized with data from OpenStreetMap and Wikidata
Internet Archive has launched a National Emergency Library and would like to work together with WikiCite
Upcoming:
- Wiki Workshop, researchers forum (fully remote), on 21 April. More information, registration
- The Celtic Knot Wikimedia Language Conference will take place fully remotely in July 2020. Call for submissions with remote formats is open until 30 April.

Press, articles, blog posts

The WikidataCon 2019 grant report
Investigating Software Usage in the Social Sciences: A Knowledge Graph Approach ("we linked the entities of the knowledge graph to other knowledge bases such as the Microsoft Academic Knowledge Graph, the Software Ontology, and Wikidata")
Wikidata as a knowledge graph for the life sciences, Andra Waagmeester et.al.
Tensor Decompositions for Temporal Knowledge Base Completion ("Additionally, we propose a new dataset for knowledge base completion constructed from Wikidata ... for evaluating temporal and non-temporal link prediction methods.")
Wikimedia Foundation’s Knowledge Infrastructure with Grant Ingersoll, CTO of Wikimedia Foundation
Improving Neural Named Entity Recognition with Gazetteers - "describes how to generate gazetteers from the Wikidata knowledge graph"
Knowledge Graphs on the Web -- an Overview - Nicolas Heist, et al.
- Some issues with this paper's reporting of Wikidata are identified in this Twitter thread
The List Revolution: Creating dynamic lists using linked data, by Alex Stinson
Video:
- Live SPARQL editing in French by Vigneron
- Live editing in English by Ainali and Abbe98: Youtube, Twitch, Periscope, Facebook
- Introduction to Wikidata video available both in English and in Welsh
- Video of the live Wikidata Querying

New tools

IdentifierInput: when adding identifiers, it lets you paste the full URL, and extracts the ID part
Wikidata knowledge imbalance dashboard - Alpha release

Technical matters

All identifiers are now sorted mostly alphabetically according to the RfC regarding the sorting of identifiers, which remains open if you have improvement proposals. Feel free to comment here!
QuickStatements change (announced 4 March). QuickStatements is now executing "run in background" batches with the same priority as direct batches run from the browser. Background batches may now run many times faster than they previously did.
News and discussions about Structured Data on Commons SPARQL endpoint
Querying the URL datatype with haswbstatement is now possible (phab:T243693). It will take two to three months before URLs are indexed for all Wikidata items.