Until recently, a small Wikipedia edition said Dianne Feinstein was San Francisco's mayor. This project could help avoid that sort of out of date info.

Warning: this blog post involves extreme hand-holding. If that irritates you and you want to try to figure out how to use VanderBot on your ...

For the Wikidata assignment.

For the Wikidata assignment.

Wikipedia is far from perfect. The same can be said of its sister project, Wikidata. And yet, excluding the World Wide Web itself, Wikipedia and Wikidata together represent the world’s largest structured humanities data source. This methods paper offers an introduction to the value of Wikidata for humanities research and makes the case for humanities researchers’ intervention in its development. It concludes with a short case study to illustrate how Wikidata can support humanities research projects. The case study project, Linked Familiarity, uses Wikidata data about the people quoted in the first ten editions of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations to look for patterns in the people Bartlett’s Familiar editorial team thought readers find quotable from 1855 and 1910. These patterns will, we hope, clarify a corner of the zeitgeist: Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations readers voted with their purchases—the book’s popularity suggests the quotes the volume’s editorial team compiled really did meet a public desire, or even need. The Linked Familiarity’s team is using Wikidata data to find out about the people worth quoting in this 55-year stretch, to examine the characteristics that unite them, and to uncover the outliers.

I have long known about OpenRefine (previously Google Refine) which is a tool for working with data, manipulating and cleaning it. As of version 3.0 (May 2018), OpenRefine included a Wikidata extension, allowing for extra reconciliation and also editing of Wikidata directly (as far as I understand it). You can find some documentation on this […]

Wikidata is arguably one of Wikipedia's most successful sister projects. It had a profound impact on Wikipedia in just a few years.

This is a guest post by Matt Miller, a Linked Data Applications Technical Specialist in the Network Development and MARC Standards Office in Library Services. Wikidata is described as “a free and open knowledge base that can be read and edited by both humans and machines.” Very similar to its wider known sibling Wikipedia, Wikidata […]

Content for labs.loc.gov.

Handouts and exercise design from a wikidata workshop designed to introduce catalogers to how they can reuse their skills to create and update wikidata records.