One of my projects for 2020 was to create one new Wikidata item – of a new type – each week. Just doing one per week would be easy, in fact, it looks like I created 206 items during 2020. The challenge was to have them be totally different, only one human, only one film, and so on (as defined by the property Instance of).

I set this challenge to myself mostly to get to know more of the different fields within Wikidata. Each field have it’s own way of modeling and some of them are easier than others, and some of them you encounter more than others. So not to get stuck in my usual tracks this seemed like a good idea.

Results

Week	Item	Label	Type label
1	Q81795643	Elisa Ghelfi	human
2	Q81846513	ISOC.nl Innovation award	award
3	Q83146620	Wikipediapodden säsong 1	podcast series season
4	Q83725717	Miljöpodden	podcast
5	Q84263995	Open Belgium 2020	conference
6	Q84591434	Dutch Global Health Film Festival	film festival
7	Q85173796	Timeline of the 2019–20 Wuhan coronavirus outbreak in February 2020	timeline
8	Q85907931	Knutmassomuseet	museum
9	Q86839655	Production and processing of graphene and related materials	handbook
10	Q87353927	Swedish Climate Policy Council report 2019	report
11	Q87722315	Regulation prohibiting public meetings and public events	implementing regulation
12	Q88286009	Law regarding temporary closure of school activities in the event of extraordinary events in peacetime	act
13	Q88974041	Principles for accessibility of information to be reused	Swedish public consultation
14	Q89418086	Prime Minister Stefan Löfven’s speech to the nation	speech to the nation
15	Q90150519	indicator 13.2.2 of the Sustainable Development Goals	Sustainable Development Goal Indicator
16	Q91104282	Introduction to Philosophy: Ethics	educational book
17	Q92101946	Food for Progress Sweden AB	business
18	Q92960393	SHM, places	data set
19	Q93327372	The Out Crowd	podcast episode
20	Q94578230	LEOS	free software
21	Q95148468	Guidelines for Authors of Papers to be Published in Springer Computer Science Proceedings	manual
22	Q95964376	Closing the loop	film
23	Q96122939	the largest spruce in Stockholm	tree
24	Q96279186	Guardian	web fiction
25	Q96739150	Swedish copyright act 1 chapter 9 §	article
26	Q96739634	individual motion	motion
27	Q96807071	Abstract Wikipedia	Wikimedia project
28	Q97101259	Pave way for sustainable protein	individual motion
29	Q97446837	rya	weaving technique
30	Q97670193	Chair of the Committee on the Labour Market	public office
31	Q97971371	Nordic textile awards 2000	recurrent event edition
32	Q98152348	Medeltidsveckan 1984	Medeltidsveckan
33	Q98425903	2016 excavation of Skällvik castle ruins	excavation
34	Q98557007	Electricity Intensity of Internet Data Transmission: Untangling the Estimates	scholarly article
35	Q98770604	Trettondagsmarschen	musical composition
36	Q98918563	Galven	human settlement
37	Q99194018	Tranås station	railway station
38	Q99488528	Återbruka mera	Faceboook group
39	Q99673322	Delicatoboll	chokladboll
40	Q99951345	hälsingeostkaka	ostkaka
41	Q100276734	Agenda: partiledardebatt	television program
42	Q100574195	Söderväg	street
43	Q101070007	consulate general of Sweden in Brussels	consulate general
44	Q101072294	Tuesday and Wednesday	range of days of the week
45	Q101331062	rosemary	spice
46	Q102440976	Digital Public Goods Alliance	alliance
47	Q102442905	Digital Public Goods Standard	open standard
48	Q102440268	Digidem Lab	civic tech organization
49	Q103911866	Han har ett sätt	music track with vocals
50	Q104150918	UNFCCC secretariat	secretariat
51	Q104383034	ropsu	pancake
52	Q104601133	Sångbäcken	brook
53	Q104601487	Sångbäcksfallet	waterfall

The way I picked the topic each varied, and turned out to follow a few themes. A few of them are related to current events, another batch are related to what I was editing on the wikis anyway and a few that I just stumbled upon that needed to be fixed. A couple of times I got tips on what to create, and others still was very hard to figure out.

Tweets and edits

I tweeted all my edits often with some more comments under the hashtag #52wikidataweeks, but for your convenience, here they are along with some stats:

Week tweet	# edits	Total edits
1	45	45
2	15	60
3	35	95
4	18	113
5	11	124
6	13	137
7	13	150
8	18	168
9	23	191
10	15	206
11	24	230
12	22	252
13	23	275
14	31	306
15	61	367
16	7	374
17	23	397
18	43	440
19	56	496
20	29	525
21	24	549
22	14	563
23	7	570
24	14	584
25	11	595
26	6	601
27	13	614
28	34	648
29	43	691
30	161	852
31	9	861
32	19	880
33	22	902
34	3	905
35	20	925
36	13	938
37	10	948
38	39	987
39	64	1051
40	15	1066
41	42	1108
42	15	1123
43	21	1144
44	7	1151
45	17	1168
46	26	1194
47	23	1217
48	23	1240
49	33	1273
50	17	1290
51	28	1318
52	29	1347
53	11	1358

Besides these edits on Wikidata proper, there have been assisting edits to Wikipedia and also media uploaded to Wikimedia Commons. In some cases it also led to editing OpenStreetMap. The number of edits say very little. Some tools that I used grouped the edits (like week 34), but at least they show that anyone quite quickly can reach high edit numbers and “unlock” tools that require access rights given only to users with some edits under the belt.

Summary

This was a really fun challenge, and also quite hard. The hardest part was however not to model the items, because even for the topics I knew very little about either there are examples to look at or the very active community are helpful. No, the hardest part was to come up with items of different types that both had good sources and were notable. Some weeks (three if I remember correctly) I was a few days late, mostly because of this. If I couldn’t come up with something inspiring it was harder to get started.

As a whole though, I believe I reached my goal. I have definitely widened my knowledge of Wikidata. I also feel quite confident that I could edit more or less any topic, given decent amount of time of course. I can recommend anyone interested in Wikidata to try edit various fields. Not only do you learn about new ontologies, modeling and properties, you also get to meet editors that you might not come across otherwise. Sure, you don’t need to go on 52 week spree for that, but then again, why not?