The Whelming

A while ago I wrote about WD-infernal, an API to infer some information about a Wikidata item, that needs to be checked by a user (somehow). The idea was to offer standardized inference to multiple tools and Wikidata user scripts. I have now added two new functionalities: 1. referee, which follows extrnal IDs and external […]

The new Wikibase REST API brings standardized and simplified querying and editing of items, properties, statements etc. to Wikibase installations, first and foremost Wikidata. Last year, Wikimedia Sverige was entertaining the idea of a grant application to Wikimedia Deutschland. Part of the proposal was for me to write a Rust crate (i.e. library) for easier […]

So many Wikidata items have a “described at URL” (P973) statement, where we do not have a property to use an ID, or the source does not use IDs. I was wondering if some URL domains have accumulated in larger numbers for P973, which would make them candidates for properties. So I listed and counted […]

After I recently wrote a small on-Wiki tool that can suggest statements to add to a Wikidata item, I thought that something like this might be useful in other tools as well. So, using the same concept and technology (Rust/axum) from my Authority Control API, I wrote WD-Infernal, an API that takes data, such as […]

AI and the WikiVerse have a complicated an developing relationship. Here, I investigate possible uses of AI to assist with imports of unstructured data from Mix’n’Match into Wikidata. Approach At the time of writing, Mix’n’match contains ~162M entries. Many of them have a more-or-less helpful short description, usually taken from the respective third-party source. I […]

Just a fun little statistic for Mix’n’match. This is how many entries were matched in MnM, per year. Note: This includes Wikidata imports (eg a property exists, matches from Wikidata are imported when the catalog is created). 2013 1,905 2014 86,562 2015 572,467 2016 1,667,843 2017 2,570,586 2018 5,166,435 2019 4,002,785 2020 7,203,921 2021 4,930,444 […]

Wikimedia Commons has a lot of artworks, but it is difficult to find and query them; they sit there if you know exactly what you want, but otherwise they collect digital dust. Wikidata has many artworks that can be queried, but is missing many that are already on Commons. If there were only some way […]

Originally, I wanted to blog about adding new properties (taxon data speficially, NCBI, GBIF, and iINaturalist) to my AC2WD tool (originally described here). If you have the user script installed on Wikidata, AC2WD will automatically show up on relevant taxon items. But then I realized that the underlying tech might be useful to others, if […]

Over the years, Mix’n’match has helped to connect many (millions?) of third-party entries to Wikidata. Some entries can be identified and matched in a fully automated fashion (eg people with birth and death dates), but the majority of entries require human oversight. For some entries that works nicely, but others are hard to disambiguate from […]

My Mix’n’match tool helps matching third-party catalogs to Wikidata items. Now, things happen on Mix’n’match and Wikidata in parallel, amongst them: Wikidata items are deleted Wikidata items are merged, leving one to redirect to the other External IDs are added to Wikidata This leads to the states of Mix’n’match and Wikidata diverging over time. I […]