Just a little story I wanted to share.
As I sometimes do, today I hit the “Random item” link on Wikidata. Almost
always I can find something I can improve, and almost always I learn some
random fun fact that I usually forget within a few moments.
Today might be different. The link took me to Q14829494, the beetle species
Linsleychroma monnei. The species didn’t have much information on it: it is
a species, it had the genus, Linsleychroma. A link to the Encyclopedia of
Life and the Global Biodiversity Information Facility. There were links to
seven different Wikipedia language editions - the usual suspects for
species, Cebuano, Indonesian, Waray-Waray, Minangkabau, Vietnamese, Dutch
and Swedish. If you’re around on Wikidata you recognize this list as the
language editions who have used bot created articles extensively.
The articles had hardly more information than Wikidata. Two of them had a
sentence about the larvae being damaging to wood, some included that the
species lives in Panama. They all listed the taxon author, Giesbert 1998,
which was missing in Wikidata, so I thought, let’s add that to Wikidata.
All I need is to find or create an item for Giesbert. Shouldn’t be too hard.
OK. A bit of Googling and the name of Giesbert seems to be Edmund F.
Giesbert. Now there seems to be an actor that usually uses the name Ed
Gilbert, but who might have been born as Edmund Giesbert. Probably just a
coincidence. Although, English Wikipedia doesn’t say so anymore - that
changed in just two months ago, when the user fixed the typos on this page
and changed Giesbert to Gilbert. [
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ed_Gilbert&diff=712105192&oldid=…
]
I also reached out to the Raidohist, the editor who fixed the name
difference.
But many other sources on the Web still claim that Gilbert’s name was
Giesbert. Unfortunately, many of them seem to be copies from Wikipedia, and
thus prone to citogenesis. IMDB doesn’t say Giesbert, but Gilbert, so do a
few of the other sources. So maybe Wikipedia sourced that error?
Gilbert died in 1999 in Beverly Hills. Giesbert’s papers had no
institution, but listed his private address - this happens rarely, for
researchers without affiliation. Giesbert’s address? Beverly Hills. And
then stumbled upon this obituary for Frank Hovore [
http://oldsite.the-signal.com/?module=displaystory&story_id=33168&format=pr…],
mentioning that Frank’s old friend of thirty years, Edmund Giesbert, had
died in 1999.
Are Gilbert and Giesbert the same person? Was the actor who voiced in a
number of Disney’s shows and played in Dallas and Knight Rider, the same
person describing Linsleychroma monnei and other bugs and beetles?
Wikidata also has a number of identifiers for Gilbert, including for the
Library of Congress and VIAF - and finally, the Library of Congress seems
to give the best clue: “Edmund F. Giesbert, educ. at the Univ. of Chicago;
works in the film, TV and radio industries in Los Angeles, and pursues the
study of Coleoptera (Cerambycidae) as a serious avocation.”
Based on that, I decided to merge the newly created Gilbert into the
long-existing Giesbert.
If I am wrong - which I might easily be - feel free to fix it.
Hello!
I took some notes of the recent Wikidata Query Service instabilities
and created an incident report [1]. Some people might have additional
insight that I don't have. If that's the case, let me know and I'll
update that incident report.
Thanks all for your help and your understanding!
Guillaume
[1] https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Incident_documentation/20160503-Wikidat…
--
Guillaume Lederrey
Operations Engineer, Discovery
Wikimedia Foundation
Esteemed Wikipedia, Wikidata, Linked Data, and Semantic Web communities[*],
===
tl;dr: Released a Google Spreadsheets add-on called Wikipedia Tools
[1] that makes working with data from Wikipedia and Wikidata a breeze.
===
I am happy to release a Google Spreadsheets add-on called Wikipedia
Tools [1]. This add-on allows you to work with data from Wikipedia and
Wikidata from within a spreadsheet context using custom formulas. Let
me motivate the tools with a short example:
You may have heard of Volkswagen's #DieselGate scandal. Is this still
a problem for Volkswagen—and if so, where? Google Trends to the
rescue? Maybe [2]. But what about global impact? How do people in
Korea, an important Volkswagen export market [citation needed😉],
refer to the scandal? Turns out they call it 폭스바겐 배기가스 조작 (among
probably other options).
With a custom function from Wikipedia Tools, we can safely "translate"
from one English (a language that, for the sake of this example, we
assume we dominate well enough) Wikipedia article to many other
languages (that we do not necessarily dominate):
=WIKITRANSLATE("en:Volkswagen_emissions_scandal")
bg Афера на Фолксваген
cs Dieselgate
de VW-Abgasskandal
[…]
zh 福斯集團汽車舞弊事件
Then, using Wikipedia page views as one (among others) reasonable
popularity indicator, for each of these language results, for example
for Korean, we can get =WIKIPAGEVIEWS("ko:폭스바겐 배기가스 조작") for the last
n days, and plot the results [3] (in practice, you would probably
still normalize by size and/or total views of the particular
Wikipedia[**]).
There are a lot more custom functions implemented than I could cover
in this short example. I have put together a slide deck [4] and paper
[5] that go into more detail if you are interested, a demo with all
functions is available at [6]. The add-on also has a built-in manual
(in Google Sheets, click Add-ons→Wikipedia Tools→Show documentation)
and its underlying code is open-source [7].
Please let me know in case of any open question, feature request, or
bug. Thanks!
Cheers,
Tom
--
[1] http://bit.ly/wikipedia-tools-add-on
[2] http://www.google.com/trends/explore?hl=en-US&q=volkswagen+emissions+scanda…
[3] https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1PyFq59iEeLWpPQrWDUyU8mlmQrb4GDv2QEl…
[4] bit.ly/wikipedia-tools-slides
[5] bit.ly/wikipedia-tools-paper (PDF)
[6] https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1sVduZul787O-bRzuy0UKpRl7bkouxwaIOsx…
[7] https://github.com/tomayac/wikipedia-tools-for-google-spreadsheets/
[*] Cross-posted on purpose
(http://ruben.verborgh.org/blog/2014/01/31/apologies-for-cross-posting/),
please choose your reply options accordingly.
[**] This is a simple example for illustrative purposes, I do _not_
claim it is an accurate popularity prediction, nor do I mean to bash
Volkswagen.
--
Dr. Thomas Steiner, Employee (http://blog.tomayac.com,
https://twitter.com/tomayac)
Google Germany GmbH, ABC-Str. 19, 20354 Hamburg, Germany
Managing Directors: Matthew Scott Sucherman, Paul Terence Manicle
Registration office and registration number: Hamburg, HRB 86891
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Hoi,
One of the things Reasonator does not do is provide information on
qualifiers. I am interested particularly in Q2354820
<http://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q2354820> and where it is used.
I take it that SparQL supports such a query. Could somebody provide me with
a query that does exactly this?
<grin> it would be the first time that I actually have a use beyond
Resonator. </grin>
Thanks,
GerardM
Apologies for cross-posting.
========================================================
CALL FOR DOCTORAL CONSORTIUM PAPERS
20th International Conference on Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge
Management (EKAW 2016)
Doctoral Consortium days: 19-20 November 2016, Bologna, Italy
Abstract submission: September 8, 2016
Paper submission: July 15, 2016
Web site: http://ekaw2016.cs.unibo.it/?q=call-for-doctoral-consortium
========================================================
The EKAW 2016 Doctoral Consortium is an opportunity for PhD students to
discuss and obtain feedback on their ongoing work, plans and research
directions with/from experienced researchers in the field. The objective is
to share best practices of research methods and approaches, as well as to
exchange on what it means to engage in an academic and research career on
the topics relevant to the EKAW conference.
The Doctoral Consortium is intended for students at every stage of their
PhD. For starting PhD students (or finishing Master students), submissions
should be in the form of a well-defined problem statement, as well as a
clear plan for a research methodology to address this problem and some
ideas towards an approach. Students in their second or third year of their
PhD should also include a description of already obtained results, as well
as a clearly defined evaluation protocol. All students will have an
opportunity to present their work to an international audience. Experienced
members of the EKAW community will act as mentors, each paired with one
student and providing direct, focused feedback to them.
All proposals submitted to the EKAW 2016 Doctoral Consortium will undergo a
reviewing process with a view of providing detailed and constructive
feedback. In addition to being reviewed by at least two experienced
researchers, each paper will also be reviewed by one other student having
submitted to the Doctoral Consortium. The objective here is to make
students experience the reviewing process and to provide for each paper
different views regarding the research they describe.
== SUBMISSION INFORMATION ==
We ask the PhD students to submit a 5-8 pages description of their work.
All proposals have to be submitted electronically via the EasyChair
conference submission System (
https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=ekaw2016).
Submissions should be structured around the following items which are the
key methodological components required for a sound research narrative:
Problem: describe the core problem/research question/hypothesis of the PhD
and motivate its relevance for the knowledge management, knowledge
acquisition and knowledge representation areas;
State of the art: describe relevant related work and point out areas that
need to be improved or investigated;
Proposed Approach: present the approach taken and motivate how this is
novel with respect to existing work;
Methodology: sketch the methodology that is (or will be) adopted, including
(for late stage PhDs) the evaluation protocol, i.e. the way in which
results and/or the research hypothesis will be validated.
Results: describe the current status of the work and any results that have
been reached so far;
Conclusions and future work: conclude and specify the major items of future
work.
== ADDITIONAL SUBMISSION REQUIREMENTS ==
All submissions must be single-author submissions. Please acknowledge your
PhD advisor(s) and other contributors in the Acknowledgements section.
Students accepted to present at the Doctoral Consortium must plan to attend
the Doctoral Consortium for the whole day in order to gain as much value as
possible from the experience. Each submitter should also be aware that they
will be asked to review one other paper submitted to the Doctoral
Consortium.
Submissions must be either in PDF or in HTML, formatted in the style of the
Springer Publications format for Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS).
For details on the LNCS style, see Springer's Author Instructions (
http://www.springer.com/computer/lncs?SGWID=0-164-6-793341-0). For details
on the HTML format, see the HTML submission guide (
http://ekaw2016.cs.unibo.it/?q=html-submission-guide).
Accepted papers will appear in supplementary post-conference proceedings to
be published by Springer in the Lecture Notes in Computer Science series.
== TOPICS ==
The Doctoral Consortium focuses on the same topics of the main conference (
http://ekaw2016.cs.unibo.it/?q=callforpapers).
== IMPORTANT DATES ==
- Abstract Submission: September 8th, 2016
- Full Paper Submission: September 15th
- Notification: October 6th, 2016
- Camera-Ready: October 13th
- Doctoral Consortium: November 19th-20th, 2016
== CHAIRS ==
- Valentina Presutti (STLab, ISTC-CNR, Italy)
- Mathieu d’Aquin (KMi, The Open University, UK)
Hello,
I am trying to query the wikidata service for IMDB + the wikipedia of the
person. English only wikipedia is okay too.
I previously was able to use the following to include the
english wikipedia in the query, which is included below. I've tried the
query below, but believe I am doing something wrong. Your help is
appreciated. Thanks!
query:
PREFIX wd: <http://www.wikidata.org/entity/>
PREFIX wdt: <http://www.wikidata.org/prop/direct/>
PREFIX rdfs: <http://www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema#>
PREFIX schema: <http://schema.org/>
SELECT ?item ?IMDB ?article WHERE {
?item wdt:P345 ?IMDB
OPTIONAL {?item rdfs:label ?item_label filter (lang(?item_label) = "en")
.}
?article schema:about ?item .
?article schema:inLanguage "en" .
FILTER (SUBSTR(str(?article), 1, 25) = "https://en.wikipedia.org/")
}
ORDER BY ASC (?article)
Hi,
I think that most elements on Wikidata are nowadays too long to be
easily read by humans. There are many properties (which is great), the
information is too scattered, and this problem (if you consider it a
problem) will continue growing up.
Some suggestions come to mind...
* Visually group properties by type, using the division of
<https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Property_proposal>, or another.
* Change our current CSS rules to show properties in a more compacted way.
* Create a table of contents that automatically appears when more than N
properties have been defined for an element.
* Combine some of the above.
Is there something discussed/planned facing this issue?
Regards,
--
David Abián - davidabian.com
Vocal de Comunicación
Wikimedia España
Vega Sicilia, 2
47008 - Valladolid
https://wikimedia.es
Wikimedia España es una asociación sin ánimo de lucro española con
CIF G-10413698 inscrita en el Registro Nacional de Asociaciones,
Grupo 1, Sección 1, Núm. Nacional 597390.
«Imagina un mundo en el que cada persona
tenga acceso libre a todo el conocimiento».
Hey folks :)
Heads-up: Wikiversity will get access to the data on Wikidata on May 3rd.
Cheers
Lydia
--
Lydia Pintscher - http://about.me/lydia.pintscher
Product Manager for Wikidata
Wikimedia Deutschland e.V.
Tempelhofer Ufer 23-24
10963 Berlin
www.wikimedia.de
Wikimedia Deutschland - Gesellschaft zur Förderung Freien Wissens e. V.
Eingetragen im Vereinsregister des Amtsgerichts Berlin-Charlottenburg unter
der Nummer 23855 Nz. Als gemeinnützig anerkannt durch das Finanzamt für
Körperschaften I Berlin, Steuernummer 27/029/42207.