Friday, September 26, 2014

#Wikidata - Paul Konerko; #Chicago White Sox

Mr Konerko is one of 1,669 humans Wikidata knows about as being or having been a player of the Chicago White Sox. According to the White Sox website, Mr Konerko is very much celebrated; his gear can be bought on a charity auction, the fans are asked to vote for him so that he may win the Roberto Clemente Award. Mr Konerko is about to retire from the game.

With some regularity "members of a sports team" information is added to players past and present. They can be of any team or any sport. When this is done in an automated way, this is done based on information in an "info-box" or in a "category". At this time we do not have the technology to get the information from a "list".

Importing all this information into Wikidata is laborious. That is no problem because it presents all kinds of new opportunities. For instance when a "human" is added to such a category, we can imply that he or she IS a member of that sports team. Another opportunity occurs when a person gains an article in another language; in that case we already know to what category he or she may be added.

As this process of incrementally adding more people from categories continues, Mr Konerko will be recognised not only as a White Sox player but also as a Los Angeles Dodgers and a Cincinnati Reds player among others.
Thanks,
      GerardM

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