{"id":2207,"date":"2018-05-30T01:24:09","date_gmt":"2018-05-29T23:24:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.greenman.co.za\/blog\/?p=2207"},"modified":"2018-06-15T11:41:20","modified_gmt":"2018-06-15T09:41:20","slug":"cape-town-wiki-meetup-with-wikimedia-foundations-asaf-bartov","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.greenman.co.za\/blog\/?p=2207","title":{"rendered":"Cape Town wiki meetup with Wikimedia Foundation’s Asaf Bartov"},"content":{"rendered":"

Cape Town was very lucky to host Wikimedia Foundation’s Senior Program Officer Asaf Bartov at the end of his Africa tour. We held a meetup, and it proved particularly inspiring to those attending.<\/p>\n

Asaf spoke about Wikidata<\/a>, discussed projects using the data, and demonstrated a number of tools that were new to most of us, such as https:\/\/query.wikidata.org<\/a>, which uses the SPARQL query language to query Wikidata content.<\/p>\n

\"Cape<\/p>\n

Wikidata adds structure to the content which makes pulling out all kinds of related information possible. Wikipedia data is fairly unstructured. Numerous categories exist, so if you’re looking for, say, a list of South African politicians, there’s both a list page<\/a> and a category page<\/a>. However, if you want something more detailed, such as a list of South African politicians that have a father that was a politician, without lots of manual slogging, Wikipedia alone won’t be much help. That’s where https:\/\/query.wikidata.org<\/a> comes in, and once familiar with SPARQL, such questions are easy to answer.<\/p>\n

Even more exciting to me was Quarry<\/a>. Years ago I remember toying with the idea of downloading a Wikipedia database dump, but at the time the massive download would probably have ground South Africa’s internet to a halt. Quarry is an interface for running SQL queries directly on the Wikimedia Foundation’s backend MariaDB databases. The bar to getting something useful is a little higher than on https:\/\/query.wikidata.org<\/a>, as to use it effectively requires getting to know the data structure, but since access is direct, it’s a tremendously powerful tool to extract almost anything you want.<\/p>\n

The easiest way to get started is to take someone else’s query and modify it. For example, here is a query listing pages from the Afrikaans Wikipedia<\/a> that don’t have an Afrikaans label on Wikidata, which I forked from Asaf’s demo run during the meetup: https:\/\/quarry.wmflabs.org\/query\/27283<\/a><\/p>\n

I can already see myself diving in and automating and expanding the (semi) regular African language updates I do, or getting automatic notifications of activity in some of the small South African language Wikipedias.<\/p>\n

And if those listed above are not enough, Asaf has a tool section on his user page<\/a> listing yet more wonderful tools you’ve probably never heard of.<\/p>\n

Thanks Asaf for taking the initiative to pay a visit to some of the African Wikimedia communities, and leaving a trail of inspiration in your wake.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Cape Town was very lucky to host Wikimedia Foundation’s Senior Program Officer Asaf Bartov at the end of his Africa tour. We held a meetup, and it proved particularly inspiring to those attending. Asaf spoke about Wikidata, discussed projects using the data, and demonstrated a number of tools that were new to most of us,… Continue reading Cape Town wiki meetup with Wikimedia Foundation’s Asaf Bartov<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[14],"class_list":["post-2207","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-earth-literature","tag-wikimedia","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.greenman.co.za\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2207","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.greenman.co.za\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.greenman.co.za\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.greenman.co.za\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.greenman.co.za\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2207"}],"version-history":[{"count":18,"href":"https:\/\/www.greenman.co.za\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2207\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2226,"href":"https:\/\/www.greenman.co.za\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2207\/revisions\/2226"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.greenman.co.za\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2207"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.greenman.co.za\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2207"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.greenman.co.za\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2207"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}