Today, Wikidata turns 13! 🎉 I am bringing a few small gifts. Two of them were already described in the Hackathon blog post I made earlier this week, but I’ll mention them again.
First, it was the sparql-minimizer tool, that can make your queries smaller and easier to use in other tools.
One day in the grocery store, I found candy strings that came in almost red, green and blue and the way they were packaged got me associating to how we sometimes need to disentangle (detangle?) items on Wikidata. A photo shoot and some cleanup editing, and these images were made.
The last present just came in an inspiration, perhaps because I recently saw an old video of Sean Locke improvising a limerick. Anyway, here is mine.
A man from Q350. Had statements that looked a bit shifty. So without any force he added a source. With Citoid, oh wow, that was nifty.
Last Saturday, there was a one-day mini hackathon at the Wikimedia Nederland office in Utrecht. Just like the last time I went to one of these, I wanted to summarize the things I hacked on. As before, the atmosphere was great: relaxed and inspiring. The event space they have is working great, and in true Dutch style, the logistics worked great. I basically completed four tasks of various sizes and starting points. Completed may also be generous, that nothing is thoroughly tested and there is likely bugs to fix as soon as they get used. Thanks to User:TheDJ who helped me several times when I felt I was stuck.
Migrating to Codeberg
Last year I made a small animation for the Wikidata 12th birthday. As this have small and simple repository, I felt like a good starting task of the day was to migrate it to Codeberg. This was straightforward and just needed some minor adjustments in the README. The new thing for me was to learn how the concept of hosted “pages” works on Codeberg, and I got it working after just a few struggles. Feeling good from getting some administrative tasks that is a part of some overarching goals for me, I went on to a slightly more challenging task.
Adapting the animation for MediaWiki
A static HTML is nice, but what if I could get the animation onto a wiki? I lately learned about TemplateStyles, so this was a way to test my skills. After some struggle with changing ContentModels of a page on the wiki and sanitizing the CSS, my templatestyle showed up nicely on a test page.
Making and showing slides onwiki
This was my big goal for the day. I have enjoyed the reveal.js project and the way one can make very simple but still beautiful slides. What if I could do something similar, even if it is a lot simpler in turns of functionality, using user scripts and template styles to make it possible to create the slides onwiki and then show them in-place. No need for other presentation software or “uploading” slides. Easy to share and in a true wiki spirit also possible to collaborate or improve upon.
This turned out to be more difficult, mostly because I am not great at Javascript, but after some headbutting and repeated trial and error testing to see what was working or not I got something that has the basic functionality. With this I was positively surprised, because I wasn’t convinced that it would be possible at all when the day started (or when I failed to make progress in the middle too).
With a userscript, a templatestyle and some special html elements in the wiki page syntax it can be used. Just press the Play slideshow button and navigate with left and right arrow keys. I also spent too much time to get the previous animation to show up on a slide. It’s not a great solution but I think it fits a hackathon (see slide 6) and it is not really the part of the framework I will start using in the future so see that as a fun bonus.
Making SPARQL queries smaller
This project was almost done when I arrived and my original plan was just to get it deployed on toolforge. My initial driver to start this was just to make a tool to convert a query to a one-line query, as some other tools are requiring it and fixing them manually (even with good find and replace tools) were getting tedious. Once started, it was impossible to unsee other things that could also be cleaned up. So there I was with a tool working fairly good locally. And I am pretty sure I was this far when Albin shared a similar tool that he already had deployed, so I stopped working on it. But with some time over at the hackathon, and unable to find his tool at the moment, I added a few more options to my tool and then got it deployed at sparql-minimizer.toolforge.org.
On Tuesday, 29 October, Wikidata turns twelve, and I had been thinking about creating a small birthday gift to celebrate. Earlier, I had experimented with creating an animated background to use in our Editing Wikidata live streams, but never got one that worked well. But the thought popped up again, and perhaps I could do something different.
As it were, another thought I had also been pondering was how to do a refresh on the older web slides I used to present and if I could use the animated background I have on aina.li. Two thoughts turned into one, and I made an animated Wikidata background for the web.
Yes, it is a bit silly, and not hugely useful for the sum of human knowledge, but a celebration has to be a bit fun too. So happy 12th birthday Wikidata, I hope you enjoy all your gifts.
The week before last I was in Katowice in Poland for the annual conference Wikimania. Overall, it was well-organized, but as in any big conference, there are always things to improve. Unfortunately, there always seem to be some things that have been done better in the past that are regressing (for example, not using multilingual menus). I wonder how we can not only capture the learnings from every year, but also successfully transfer them over to the next.
Overview
As usual, I used the learning pattern Documenting your event experience, continuously documenting what I was doing, watching and participating in, along with notes of thoughts that I got. In total, I partook in 24 sessions and as organizer/speaker of another 3 myself during the conference. I have later watched another 6 sessions and have 7 still on my backlog, so the conference will stay in my mind for quite some time. I will delve deeper into the different aspects of my Wikimania experience below.
Podcast
This year I tried to get people together, but it was difficult to get hold of people as they were so busy with all the sessions. I did record one session, but it has not been edited yet. Per Wikipediapodden tradition, we did record one episode leading up to Wikimania and one episode summarizing it. These two are, alas, only available in Swedish.
I participated in this panel as part of my work in the Open Climate Data project for Creative Commons that I do in Open By Default now. The session was overflowing with people, apparently a huge interest. Many of the questions were specifically about the intersection with Wikidata, and I think there are some things Wikimedia needs to do to really enable this. First, create a connection from the Wikidata Query Service to the Data namespace on Wikimedia Commons. Second, enabling Structured data in the Data namespace on Wikimedia Commons so that provenance and attribution can be solved.
While I had a workshop session with this title last year, this year it was a poster session. I think at least a few people got inspired to take a closer look at their countries when back home, and I got some good sources immediately when standing there.
This poster really sparked many interesting conversations. It was inspiring that so many attendees were so knowledgeable about Wikidata and also found it important.
I was recently a guest on the podcast Between the brackets. The podcast usually covers MediaWiki related topics, but from time to time, also have Wikimedians as guests. It was a lot of fun, since we talked about almost all the things I am currently involved in. We mostly talked about the Foundation for Public Code, Wikidata, Govdirectory, Wikimedians for Sustainable Development but also a bit about AI and Abstract Wikipedia.
Two weeks ago, I participated in the mini hackathon in Utrecht. It turned out to be quite productive and I manage to complete four different tasks. But mostly it was fun to meet wikimedians again (and they also served some tasty vegan pastries).
Wikidata based maps
First, I helped improve the map about accused witches to also have colors based on the gender of the accused person. This was done by binding the gender label to a layer. Then I also made a version for Kartographer using colors on the marker symbols.
Common properties user script for Wikidata
I have several times created a query to help me understand how a topic is modeled, by exploring which properties have a specific item as a value. There is a gadget that does something very similar to what I had in mind, Easy query. So based on that, I managed to create a user script I called common-properties.js. You can see it used in this video.
Mapframe code snippet
Similarly, I have wished for Wikidata Query Service to have Kartographer’s <mapframe> as one of the code examples in the results view. I had even created a Phabricator task for it. With some excellent help from Lucas Werkmeister it resulted in a patch to gerrit. And it has already been merged!
The new mapframe code snippet.
Podcast interview
With so many interesting people in one place, I couldn’t resist recording a special episode in English for Wikipediapodden. I talked to Siebrand Mazeland, one of the organizers, about this hackathon and hackathon organizing in general.
Just over two weeks ago, I got the chance to give my first OpenRefine talk in Wikimedia Portugal’s celebrations of the Wikidata tenth birthday. Although Zoom gave me some technical troubles in the start, I think the actual talk went pretty well. You can judge for yourself because the video is published on their YouTube channel (where my struggles luckily has been taken out). It’s a quick walkthrough of the interface and some of the strategies you might have when using OpenRefine. In it, I am doing some cleaning of a dataset and reconcile it with Wikidata and make upload some of the data.
Planering pågår världen över för Wikidata tioårsdag (29 oktober) och det har annonserats om möjligheter att ansöka om medel för att arrangera lokala evenemang i samband med detta. Det var när ytterligare en sådan påminnelse kom sm jag började fundera om jag skulle dra ihop något här där jag bor, och vad jag i så fall skulle behöva pengar för. En sak som nämndes var att de inte skulle göra någon merchandise centralt och skicka runt i världen, utan istället hade satt ihop grafik så att man skulle kunna göra det själv istället. Eftersom att det fanns fina SVG filer tänkte jag att man skulle kunna göra något snyggt t-shirttryck.
Och då en av bakgrundbilderna hade ett synnerligen grafiskt mönster väcktes idén om en t-shirt med “all over print”. Sagt och gjort, jag laddade också ner loggan, började knåpa och leta leverantörer. Efter en del slit, SVG-filerna var krångligt konstruerade, hade jag i alla fall både print-filer och leverantör. 33 euro och en vecka senare, voilá! Filerna jag använde för att trycka finns på Wikimedia Commons.
T-shirt design for Wikidata’s 10th anniversary
Planning is underway worldwide for Wikidata’s tenth anniversary (October 29) and opportunities to apply for funding to host local events have been announced. It was when another such reminder came that I started thinking about whether I should pull something together here where I live, and if so, what I would need money for. One thing that was mentioned was that they would not make any merchandise centrally and send it around the world, but instead had put together graphics so that you could do it yourself instead. Since there were nice SVG files, I thought it would be possible to make some nice t-shirt printing.
And when one of the background images had a particularly graphic pattern, the idea of a t-shirt with “all over print” sprung to mind. All said and done, I also downloaded the logo, started tinkering and looking for suppliers. After some hard work, the SVG files were complexly constructed, I at least had both print files and supplier. 33 euros and a week later, voilá! The files I used for the print can be found on Wikimedia Commons.
Last weekend, it was time for the WikidataCon 2021. It was three days full of sessions with both short and long sessions and small and large ideas. As always, one of the most interesting sessions is the community awards because this is a time for celebrating the work of each other. And this year it was a bit special for me, because I was part of some of the winners. I’ll talk about them below, the link under the images takes you directly to the YouTube video when the award was revealed.
This is the latest project, that Albin Larsson and I started, and that I’ve written about before. Since then, in the short five months it has existed, many more people have joined and helped and also deserves the recognition. It feels particularly good to now win a prize for this, as I have been thinking about it for many years.
On March 29, 2020, Albin Larsson and I got together with this small idea of just editing Wikidata for an hour, but to live stream it. Our plans were not big at the time, but we had fun, so we kept going. After a while we also started to get regulars hanging out with us, so that made it easier to continue. The stream is very casual, and our goal is mostly to show what we have learned and at the same time learn from each other. As I know that community building is very important this made me really happy.
Special sustainability categories
For the first time some special awards were given with a focus on the Sustainable Development Goals. As one of the co-founders of Wikimedians for Sustainable Development, these categories alone felt like a win. And to add to that joy, I was part of some awarded categories.
In the project with the Swedish Riksdag documents, it’s truly a team effort. Users Popperipopp and Belteshassar have been doing most of the edits, whereas I have helped with the data modeling and research, and several other users have also helped out.
Finally, I am also happy that WikiProject Biodiversity was awarded in the category Sustainable environment. As I haven’t really been editing much at all in this project, here most of the glory should be given to the other project members. But I am still happy that I have been able to help out with live streaming.
Final thoughts
I am a bit blown away with all this recognition. I am honored and humbled by it. Best of all, even though this has taken many hours, it has mostly been a great deal of fun for me! Editing Wikidata is for me a feeling of being able to contribute knowledge to the world in a way that truly scales and easily can be used by others. There are so many places with knowledge gaps to fill that it’s possible to be entirely lust driven and never run out of stuff to do. I encourage you to go explore the corners of Wikidata of your interests and see if making connections gives you the same joy it does for me.
Image credits
All images by Artur Torres, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Click the image to get to the file information page.
Today at the Code for all 2021 Summit, I had the honor to present a lightning talk about the Govdirectory together with Albin Larsson. You can watch the talk below.
