Wednesday, March 26, 2014

#Wikidata - the best tools


The best tools are the tools that are used. This tool by Sany14 ticks many important boxes. Its intention is to manage Wikidata items that are linked to only one Wikipedia. There are some 8,609,483 such items. Many of these items should be merged with other items. Rahimanuddin Shaik informed me that many of the lonely links to the Telugu Wikipedia should be merged.

The question is if there is an easy way to identify potential matches. The next question will be, what to do when you have identified a match. When an item is in Telugu only, the first thing to do is to add labels in other languages. When you do, it makes sense to compare existing items in that other language. They are the potential duplicate items.

It would be awesome when people who develop tools share technology. When Sandy14 has a way to query a dump for lonely items, it may be possible to do this on a database that is kept up to date. In this way users of the tool will notice the results of their work. When shared components are used, a hover box can be used that shows known information in a language. Automated descriptions will not only inform our readers but also help our tool users. The tool users, they are us.

I am excited about this tool and I hope it will get more exposure and becomes part of a tool set that brings out the best of Wikidata.
Thanks,
      GerardM

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