Practical – Let’s get nautical

Creating Listeria lists is a great way of finding out what information Wikidata possesses and, by extension, what Wikipedia may be missing.

e.g.

But there are other ways of getting data out of Wikidata.

 

Getting data out of Wikidata

For getting data about individual Wikidata items (or groups of up to 50)

Run advanced queries and get back data for up to around 200k items

Download all available data for large scale local processing of any size

Read more about Wikidata data access →

 

What is SPARQL? Visit www.query.wikidata.org 

SPARQL is a programming language for querying ‘linked data’ stored on the web.

It’s essentially a set of commands that allow you to find exactly the data you want.

Learning SPARQL will allow you to query Wikidata, but also the countless other data sources offering a SPARQL query service

  • E.g. Show me a list of all Female Chemists, along with their date of birth, place of birth, and the map coordinates of their place of birth.

How hard would it be to do that using Google!?!

 

Practical – a SPARQL query about ships.

 

The task is to contribute to the data available to either:

  1. The ships on Wikidata above. Using information from the Wikipedia articles can you add more data? Can it be referenced from a reliable source using the Reference URL? Check prominent examples such as RMS Titanic to see how many properties could be included.
  2. The notable women in medicine Listeria list. Can more be added? Place of birth data? Date of birth data? Place of education data? Can it be referenced with a Reference URL? If not we can use the property Imported from and the value English Wikipedia as a placeholder reference.

To add a reference

  • Check the Wikipedia page to see if a reference has been added.
  • If not, Google search depending on what you are looking to reference; place of education, place of birth or date of birth.
  • Once you have found corroboration from a reliable published source, copy the URL web address and paste into the Reference URL field in Wikidata. Click Save.