Wednesday, November 05, 2025

Missing award recipients in both Wikidata and the Wikipedias

Professor Fei-Fei Li is one of the recipients of the 2025 Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering. It says so on the English Wikipedia and it is confirmed on the website of the prize.

There are nine Wikipedias with an article for the award and there is Wikidata. When the 2025 awardees are known on a Wikipedia, "2025" should be available in the text of the article. Otherwise the article is likely out of date. The recipients should be known on Wikidata AND there should be an "award received" for the award with a date of 2025.

When you check Wikidata for this award using "Reasonator", you will find that Wikidata is in need of an update. It is by accident that I learned of this award. Updates are an hit or miss affair, this would be improved when a bot produces a list of all the awards that are in need of updates. When a bot produces this list for every Wikipedia for all the known awards, it enables people to do this maintenance work. 

Obviously 2025 is this year and it will have the most mutations. A similar job can be run for other years but it is less likely to bring many additions, more likely these list will become reduced in size over time.

Thanks,

      GerardM

Saturday, November 01, 2025

English Wikipedia awards, a Wikidata user story

I noticed that Yahvinder Malhi received the Roman Magalev Prize on Bluesky. There is an English Wikipedia article for both Mr Malhi and for the prize. I looked it up, Mr Malhi is not known as a prize winner on the article for the prize, it is however on the his personal article as a text reference.

So why not have a tool that produces a list for all awards on a Wikipedia where Wikidata knows about an award AND an award winner where both have a Wikidata item and the award winner is not on the award article. Easy obvious and it will improve the quality of articles about awards.

This can work two ways.. Why not have a tool that produces a list where awards known at Wikidata are not linked on the article.

Technically it is not that hard. It is just a few queries that are to be run on a regular basis. It is the user interface where it becomes tricky. How will a user know that something was fixed.. How will we run it for all the Wikipedias.. Will we be smart and recognise red links..

Another tool could be where we indicate to Wikipedias with an article for an award when a change happened for that award.. particularly new award winners for the current year.. It could be a list where editors are triggered to revisit their articles.

Thanks,

       GerardM