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@wikimedia.de

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Mohammed Sadat

Community Communications Manager for Wikidata/Wikibase

Wikimedia Deutschland e.V.
Tempelhofer Ufer 23-24
10963 Berlin
www.wikimedia.de

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