User:Charles Matthews/Facto Post/Issue 10 – 12 March 2018

Facto Post – Issue 10 – 12 March 2018
{| style="position: relative; margin-left: 2em; margin-right: 2em; padding: 0.5em 1em; background-color: #7FFFD4; border: 2px solid #00FFFF; border-color: rgba( 109, 193, 240, 0.75 ); border-radius: 8px; box-shadow: 8px 8px 12px rgba( 0, 0, 0, 0.7 );"
 * Facto Post – Issue 10 – 12 March 2018

 

Milestone for mix'n'match
Around the time in February when Wikidata clicked past item Q50000000, another milestone was reached: the mix'n'match tool uploaded its 1000th dataset. Concisely defined by its author,, it works "to match entries in external catalogs to Wikidata". The total number of entries is now well into eight figures, and more are constantly being added: a couple of new catalogs each day is normal.

Since the end of 2013, mix'n'match has gradually come to play a significant part in adding statements to Wikidata. Particularly in areas with the flavour of digital humanities, but datasets can of course be about practically anything. There is a catalog on skyscrapers, and two on spiders.

These days mix'n'match can be used in numerous modes, from the relaxed gamified click through a catalog looking for matches, with prompts, to the fantastically useful and often demanding search across all catalogs. I'll type that again: you can search 1000+ datasets from the simple box at the top right. The drop-down menu top left offers "creation candidates", Magnus's personal favourite. Mix'n'match/Manual for more.

For the Wikidatan, a key point is that these matches, however carried out, add statements to Wikidata if, and naturally only if, there is a Wikidata property associated with the catalog. For everyone, however, the hands-on experience of deciding of what is a good match is an education, in a scholarly area, biographical catalogs being particularly fraught. Underpinning recent rapid progress is an open infrastructure for scraping and uploading.

Congratulations to Magnus, our data Stakhanovite!

Links
To subscribe to Facto Post go to Facto Post mailing list. For the ways to unsubscribe, see below. Editor, for ContentMine. Please leave feedback for him. Back numbers are here. Reminder: WikiFactMine pages on Wikidata are at WD:WFM. If you wish to receive no further issues of Facto Post, please remove your name from our mailing list. Alternatively, to opt out of all massmessage mailings, you may add Category:Wikipedians who opt out of message delivery to your user talk page. Newsletter delivered by MediaWiki message delivery
 * Wikipedia goes 3D allowing users to upload .STLs for digital reference, Beau Jackson for 3dprintingindustry.com, February 22 2018
 * WikiCite report (video)
 * Formal publication and announcement of ISBN citation dataset, see Twitter post, February 23 2018
 * Plotting the Course Through Charted Waters, workshop on data visualization literacy from Mikhail Popov, Wikimedia Foundation
 * Using Wikidata to build an authority list of Holocaust-era ghettos, Nancy Cooey, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, February 12 2018
 * Why Should You Learn SPARQL? Wikidata! Mark Longair, blogpost November 29 2017
 * Back to the future: Does graph database success hang on query language?, George Anadiotis for Big on Data, March 5 2018
 * }