Submissions:2015/An ambitious Wikidata tutorial

Title

An ambitious Wikidata tutorial

Theme

Technology

Type of submission

Workshop

Author

Emw

E-mail address

emw.wiki@gmail.com

Username

Emw

Affiliation

Abstract

This tutorial will be an ambitious survey of Wikidata for hackers and humans, as taught by an experienced volunteer.

Attendees will learn:

• What people have been building with Wikidata. We'll briefly cover what kinds of projects people have developed atop Wikidata in not only Wikipedia, but also external projects for biology, history, libraries, archives, museums and beyond. Get ideas for how Wikidata can enhance and extend your project's reach.

• Wikidata vocabulary and conventions. Learn the lingo: statements, items, properties, qualifiers, references. In addition to covering those elements of the Wikidata data model, I will also introduce you to useful everyday properties and basic membership properties like instance of (P31), subclass of (P279), and part of (P361).

• How to edit Wikidata. This isn't your grandpa's wiki. Wikidata's editing interface is not a hairball of prose and square brackets like the classic Wikipedia, nor a more familiar WSIWYG like VisualEditor. Wikidata's editing UI is casual-user-friendly but has some novel features. We will collaboratively edit an example Wikidata item to get you up to speed.

• How to find things and where to get help: Handy tricks in the search UI, where different community discussions occur, how to do background research on Wikidata topics, how to reach Wikidata developers and the director.

• Advanced querying. Find all humans. Find all genes. Find all municipalities in the United States with a population between 5,000 and 20,000. Find all European nobility who died in a hunting accident. Find all kinds of footwear. We'll use tools from Magnus Manske as well as SPARQL endpoints.

• Programming with the Wikidata API. A quick demo using Python.

• How to use the Wikidata RDF and OWL exports. Explore the project's structured data dumps in Protege, the browser of the Semantic Web.

• The promise and peril of ontologies. What was the cause of the American Civil War? Can a cat be a mayor? Is Harry Potter a human? Meaning matters, and bit of linguistic precision in Wikidata can open opportunities for automatically answering common, non-trivial questions.

• What Wikidata means for the future of human knowledge. Clay Shirky popped a bubble with his 2003 essay The Semantic Web, Syllogism, and Worldview. Over a decade thereafter, that vision of Tim Berners-Lee continues to be a distant prospect. In the meantime, Wikipedia's human editor base has been in decline since March 2007. This section will take a look at where Wikidata fits in historical context, how it can mitigate declining editor engagement in Wikipedia, and how it can address the problems described in Shirky's critique to become the centralized knowledge base and reasoning platform for the Semantic Web.

Length of presentation

60 minutes

Special schedule requests

Saturday or Sunday, please

Will you attend WikiConference USA if your submission is not accepted?

Yes

Interested attendees

If you are interested in attending this session, please sign with your username below. This will help reviewers to decide which sessions are of high interest. Sign with four tildes. (~~~~).

1. Rhododendrites (talk) 23:40, 28 August 2015 (EDT)
2. Gaurav (talk) 17:29, 29 August 2015 (EDT) (this sounds AWESOME!)
3. emitraka aka lv_ra