Wikidata workshops with Asaf Bartov in 2017 (Tallinn, Tartu)

Wikidata introductionary workshops with Asaf Bartov took place in Tallinn and Tartu during end of October and beginning of November 2017. The aim of the workshops was to give hands on introduction to concepts and use of Wikidata, the structured linked data project of Wikimedia. You can find the presentation, example queries etc below.

Find a reason to love Wikidata!

One of the workshops was conducted in the Literary Museum of Estonia.

Description

Almost all information on Wikipedia (in all languages), Wikimedia Commons (media repository of Wikipedia) and many other Wikiprojects (Wikispecies, Wikibooks, Wikisource, Wikiquote, Wiktionary, Wikivoyage etc) and many other public datasets gathered since 2012 can be mined in machine readable format at Wikidata, Wikimedia's open and free linked-data repository.

Asaf Bartov, one of the key worldwide evangelists of Wikidata will be holding two workshop sessions on Oct 30th at IT college, Tallinn and Oct 31st sTARTUp HUB, Tartu. He will also present keynote at Open licences, open content, open data conference Nov 1–3 at Estonian National Museum in Tartu (and host yet another workshop for digital humanities researchers).

Workshop materials

The presentation given by Asaf.

• A Gentle Introduction for Complete Beginners (Estonia 2017)

Example queries

The queries roughly increase in order of complexity.

• All Estonians
• All Estonians who are poets
• All poets who speak/write Estonian
• All Estonians who were born in either Tartu *or* Tallinn
• All Estonians *except* those born in Tallinn
• All Estonian poets with their birth place, *including* those without a birth place
• All Estonian poets born after 1950
• All Estonians named "Jaan"
• Estonian politicians whose father is/was also a politician
• Popular names among Estonians (bubble chart FTW!)
• Things in Estonia, on a map (maps FTW!)
• Distribution of biography articles by (top 50) occupation(s) on Estonian Wikipedia
• Distribution of biography articles by (top 50) occupation(s) *of women* on Estonian Wikipedia
• All paintings depicting Estonia or something in it (currently returning only 1 result, sadly)
• All paintings depicting Finland or something in it (returning more results)

Estonia specific TODO lists for Wikidata:

• TODO list for Estonian Wikidata
• Top 100 missing labels for Wikidata items in Estonian

Introductionary materials on Wikidata

• Wikidata and queries
• A gentle introduction to Wikidata for Absolute Beginners (including non-techies!)
• Wikidata: A beginner-friendly course for SPARQL
• A gentle introduction to the Wikidata Query Service

About workshop

The workshop in both venues takes place in two parts (first is prerequisite for understanding the second part).

The first one starting from 16 presents Wikidata and walks attendees from absolute beginner level through contributing to Wikidata and understanding the structured linked data architecture used in the project.

The second one starting from 18 is about querying Wikidata using SPARQL and making practical use of Wikidata for extracting facts, creating knowledge graphs and importing data for use with external tools and Google Spreadsheets.

Wikidata is an endless resource of structured linked data on all imaginable topics with an open API and full database dumps freely available, Wikidata can a useful resource for countless general as well as specific purposes. For example, Google uses it for displaying facts in search results, the uses of Wikidata span from marketing to semantic web solutions, not to mention analysis of history and differences in Wikiprojects and their contents from different cultures and languages.

Asaf Bartov is working as a senior program officer at Wikimedia and has a strong background in software engineering, and an abiding interest in literature, education, open access, linked data, and library science. He writes free software related to Wikimedia projects publishing the source code at https://github.com/abartov

See also

• Wikidata events in Tartu