GLAM/Newsletter/May 2018/Contents/Wikidata report

This Month in GLAM – Volume VIII, Issue V, May 2018

Normal version • Single page version

Wikidata report

EuropeanaTech conference, Lexicographical data, plus all your usual news

By Sandra F. & Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing)

Special report: Wikidata at the EuropeanaTech conference

On 14-16 May, Europeana held its EuropeanaTech conference, in Rotterdam. This brought together almost 300 European and worldwide GLAM professionals working on technical aspects of cultural heritage, aggregation and Linked Open Data (LOD). Besides many participants from (mostly larger) European cultural institutions and umbrella organizations, there were also representatives from Brazil, India (National Digital Library of India) and the US (Digital Public Library of America).

Wikimedia projects - and especially Wikidata - were prominent topics during the conference. Ben Vershbow and Sandra Fauconnier (Wikimedia Foundation), Jens Ohlig (Wikimedia Deutschland), Liam Wyatt (Europeana) and Jason Evans (National Library of Wales) actively attended EuropeanaTech. One day before the conference, Europeana hosted a well-attended Wikidata workshop day at its own office, which was fully booked with 50 registered participants from European libraries, archives and museums. During the main conference, Ben held a keynote speech (video on YouTube), Jason Evans talked about NLW's work with Wikidata (slideshow on Slideshare), and Sandra presented Structured Data on Commons (slides on Commons). Apart from those presentations there was also a panel about Wikidata as authority data, moderated by Liam, and a panel that included Wikidata's multilingual aspects. Additionally, Wikidata was also mentioned a lot throughout other people's presentations; quite a few attendees already use Wikidata actively in their own projects. In conversations during breaks and meals, we also heard a lot of interest.

Some of the main themes throughout the conference were:

Linked Open Data (LOD) in the cultural sector: how it's maturing, finally being concretely applied in the sector, and how LOD can become more usable altogether;
Decentralization, reflecting the desire from cultural institutions to maintain and take responsibility for their own data repositories and to interconnect these through LOD in an ecosystem that does not solely rely on centralized hubs.

More info:

EuropeanaTech in review (Europeana Pro)
EuropeanaTech keynote speeches (YouTube)
Presentations held during the conference (SlideShare)
Photos of the conference (Flickr, by Sebastiaan ter Burg, CC-BY 2.0)

Lexicographical data

Lexicographical data is now available on Wikidata!
- Check the announcement for more details.
- Feel free to try adding words and give feedback.
- A number of Lexicographical properties have been created.

GLAM news

Andy Mabbett gave a presentation on Wikidata at the GLAM forum which was held 10-12 May 2018 in Yerevan, Armenia. See this month's Armenia report for the full rundown.
- Slides for Andy's 'What is Wikidata: How can GLAMs work with Wikidata?' presentation
- The GLAM forum also featured on national Armenian television
Living people' articles from the English Wikipedia which have date of death or place of death on their Wikidata item: manual checks needed. You can also check Category:P570 missing in Wikipedia.
PictureThis! Is a new tool integrated to WikiShootMe! that allows you to choose an item and upload a picture of it
New feature for the Query Service: check the location of the browser
- example query: Museums near you (source)
The European Commission announces a review of the Database Directive.
Structured Data on Commons has designs for displaying and using multilingual captions on the file page. Feedback is welcome on the talk page.
TextRazor is a web service which analyses text and identifies the entities and concepts discussed, giving the corresponding Wikidata QIDs.

Tech developments

Ongoing: On 24 May, there was a significant outage affecting Wikidata and sister projects that use Wikidata. As a result, some features of are temporarily disabled: Wikidata's property suggester, Lua modules and parser functions calling by label instead of ID, search for the ArticlePlaceholder. We apologize for the inconvenience, we're working to get them back as soon as possible. For technical details, see: phab:T195520 & Incident documentation/20180524-wikidata.
The Wikimedia Hackathon 2018 was held on 18-20 May in Barcelona
- Check the hashtag #wmhack on Twitter to see what has been worked on regarding Wikidata
- List of the projects that have been demoed during the showcase
Google Summer of Code 2018
- Florian will be improving Wikidata support in the Wikipedia plugin for OpenStreetMap's JOSM editor
- Prssanna will work on improvements for the Query Service
A bunch of new constraint types were recently added.
We have deprecated units used for this property (P2237). Please update any tool which uses this property to use the new API before it gets deleted.
EditGroups is a new tool that lets you review, discuss and revert entire edit groups made by various tools.
monolingual language code shy is now available (see phab:T184783)
New constraint types: the "integer" constraint type and the "separators" parameter for the "single value" and "single best value" constraint types are now supported in WikibaseQualityConstraints.
OpenRefine 3.0 beta was released. You can get an overview of the new Wikidata-related features with tutorials and videos.