Submissions:2014/Answering Big Questions With Wikidata

Title of the submission

Answering Big Questions With Wikidata: The Story

Themes (Proposal Themes - Community, Tech, Outreach, GLAM, Education)

Tech

Type of submission (Presentation Types - Panel, Workshop, Presentation, etc)

Workshop

Author of the submission

Max Klein

E-mail address

isalix@gmail.com

Username

w:User:Maxmilianklein

US state or country of origin

California

Affiliation, if any (organization, company etc.)

None

Personal homepage or blog

http://notconfusing.com

Abstract (at least 300 words to describe your proposal)

Wikidata is live, running, and starting to fulfill its potential as a data repository, but its richness is also making it more than the sum of its parts. Wikipedia in it's early stages started to see success as an encyclopedia, but then also proved invaluable for researchers as a way to understand online collaboration. Likewise the aspects of what Wikidata can tell us as a corpus, not just it's individual facts, is slowly emerging. This workshop will be a hands-on showing researchers and programmers how to answer their big questions with Wikidata. Its's core points will be:

1. What Wikidata is from a technical aspect:
   1. Native format
   2. Structure of a Wikidata Item
   3. Data Types
2. Example Questions already answered:
   1. Which language Wikipedias are the most unique?
   2. Which languages Biography article compostion are most female?
   3. What is the name of every language in every language?
   4. What are the most popular book genres in each language Wikipedia?
   5. Denny's Coastline and Subway Maps
3. How to use Pywikipedia to get the data live.
   1. Code walkthrough.
   2. Utilizing what links here along with
   3. New classes in the pywikibot library.
4. How to use WDA to work with the data offline.
   1. WDA is a python script
   2. Now becoming a Java library.
   3. Downloads incremental dumps.
   4. At minimum you can do text parsing on a huge file
   5. More elegant solutions have already received funding.
   6. Code walkthrough.

Length of presentation/talk (see Presentation Types for lengths of different presentation types)

75 Minutes

This workshop could be done in 60 minutes.

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

Yes if I also receive travel scholarship.

Slides or further information (optional)

Have given a similar talk at Wikimedia Foundation Headquarters video here.

And blog posts [1], [2], [3], and [4].

Special request as to time of presentations

Interested attendees

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