An interesting outcome of the Wikipedia Science Conference this week is a project to get a complete set of Fellows of the Royal Society on Wikidata as items. This began yesterday afternoon, and already about a dozen people have joined in. I have just done Albert Einstein, so there are still rich pickings.

This all happens on the mix'n'match tool at

https://tools.wmflabs.org/mix-n-match/?mode=random&catalog=92&submod...

(requires WiDar authorisation, which in turn requires you are logged in on Wikipedia, but is no big deal).

Helpful is the very good alphabetical list we have up at

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Fellows_of_the_Royal_Society

which has already helped me resolve a case where a FRS with a German surname had a variant spelling. Those lists (alphabetical division) show that the English Wikipedia already has fairly good coverage. The strategy of getting a complete set onto Wikidata, and then look what needs to be created and/or translated is the modern way of improving it.

Something else that is not so positive came up also: the Royal Society website has been revamped, and many links that ran to it are now broken. This illustrates the general "link rot" phenomenon which was covered in one of the conference talks, by Geoffrey Bilder of CrossRef.

Charles