The story of African award winning scientists using Wikifunctions

You can find the winners of the Alan Pifer Research award on the English Wikipedia. One of them, the 2011 recipient is Mr Kelly Chibale. there are several ways to be informed about him. There is Scholia and Reasonator, both derive from Wikidata and then there is the Wikipedia article. All four provide information, one is unstructured and exclusively in English. The good news is that parts of it have a structure making it easy for tools to analyse and convert to data. 

A person can read an article, find and add an award not in Wikidata and choose to add the awardees or use "Awarder" to do it with less effort. It is good when it is done but analytical tools could do a better job. There are many tools that produce information in a nice layout like Listeria.. Problem is that it is not maintained by Wikimedia and it is not necessarily multilingual. 

And then there is Wikifunctions. It is developed and maintained by the Wikimedia Foundation. It could do all the things that Listeria does. Having a function that does only list all the honours and awards for someone like Mr Chibale would be great particularly when there is a function that brings to the light all the award winners for any award. An article about an award can be minimalist, and still include stuff that typically goes into an info box.

With functions available like this, it PAYS to engage in Wikifunctions for the specifics of a language for a function. It is impossible to include all awards in any language but with some imagination, we can expose information once the necessary functions are available.

Thanks,

      GerardM