Hello friends,
Wikimedia Germany software department is currently working on possibly
improving Wikidata’s API and other means of data access, and would like to
talk to people who might be interested in using Wikidata’s data or maybe
even did use it already.
If you'd like to talk to us, or perhaps you simply want to know more, then
please reach out to me or Jan directly. (also cc'd here).
Attached is a message from Jan that should provide some more insight.
Best Regards,
-Mohammed
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We would like to learn how we can improve the data access for the open
community project Wikidata, a sibling to Wikipedia.
Wikidata (www.wikidata.org) is a database storing general statements, e.g.
"[Michael Müller] is [head of government] of [Berlin]". Everyone can edit
these statements and improve them. Using stored data about other cities,
you can get answers to “give me all people who are head-of-government of
cities in Germany”.
It thus is similar to Wikipedia, but instead of an article about something,
there is a list of statements on a concept or thing, which makes
Wikidata’s data easier to use in computer programs: It is hard to parse an
article text but it is relatively easy to process Wikidata’s data and
people already do this, e.g. Histropedia for showing timelines like this
one: http://histropedia.com/timeline/466wbb666m/Discoveries-in-mathematics
– based on Wikidata’s data.
We are interested in making it easier for programmers and tool-creators to
use Wikidata’s data in their own applications.
If this is something that sounds interesting to you and if you have some
(even minor) experience with using data from other sources e.g. via APIs,
MySQL dumps, CSV… in your code, we would love to hear from you.
If possible, we would like to talk to you via an audio or video chat,
since this makes it easier to explain and demonstrate what you did or want
to do. This usually takes 20min-1h, depending on your time and interest in
the topic.
If you match the criteria and are interested in participating, please write
a mail to jan.dittrich(a)wikimedia.de
--
Mohammed Sadat
*Community Communications Manager for Wikidata/Wikibase*
Wikimedia Deutschland e.V.
Tempelhofer Ufer 23-24
10963 Berlin
www.wikimedia.de