Tuesday, August 23, 2016

#Wikidata - Colorado Women's Hall of Fame

There is a continuous effort underway in #Wikipedia to celebrate notable women. When women are seen as a role model, it is obvious that they deserve attention.

The Colorado Women's Hall of Fame is an organisation that celebrates women and every year 10 more women are included. The article on the organisation includes a list and it includes many red links. So more can be done, not only in Wikipedia but also in Wikidata.

As Wikidata is maturing, SPARQL is now of sufficient quality that many of the tools developed by Magnus are transitioning to SPARQL. This takes time and at the same time some tools are discontinued or do not fully function any more. Linked Items is one such tool. It creates a list of items that are found in a Wikipedia text. It is ideal when a text based file full of wiki links exist. It is just a matter of copying in the links and it will generate a list with Wikidata items for you. It is then needed to restrict the items that are used and it was possible to use WDQ the engine that could when SPARQL for Wikidata was a distant dream. Sadly it does not work anymore.

A solution is taking the list of items and copying to Petscan, the tool Magnus favours. It uses SPARQL and it is something of a Swiss army knife for data. When you are used to earlier tools like Autolist, many of the assumptions are wrong and it takes time to discover how the tool works. It does and that is why there are a large number of women who are known to be on the Colorado women's hall of fame.
Thanks,
      GerardM

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