Sunday, October 12, 2014

#Wikidata - the maintenance of #awards

Mrs Kizer died. She won several awards. One of the awards she won was the Robert Frost medal, another award was the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize. Two other awards, the John Masefield Memorial Award and the Borestone Award are not linked in the article yet.

The funny thing with awards is that they have a habit of being awarded regularly. This has several consequences;
  • you can predict how many winners there may have been
  • you can predict when the next winner is likely to be known
Given that many awards are not maintained as well as for instance the Nobel Prize or the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, it should not be that hard to produce something that lists all the awards that have no winner yet for a given year. Wikidata already provides most of the main elements; these are all the awards for instance and it shows how many Wikipedias have an article for them.

By adding a statement about the frequency of the award it becomes [possible to find the awards that were not awarded in a given year. It will stimulate adding awards, it can be the basis for a tool that shows lists of winners on Wikipedias and it would stimulate me to indicate that Mrs Kizer won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1985.
Thanks,
     GerardM

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