Jan Ainali

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

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:

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?