A glimpse into how Wikidata is streamed into the actual body of an article on Wicipedia Cymraeg (cywiki). Robin Owain (Wikimedia UK Wales Manager) talks about his work over the last 6 years integrating Wikidata within Wicipedia Cymraeg.
<p>Text: Bore da. My name is Robin owain, and I'm the Wikimedia UK Manager for Wales. To celebrate 8 years of Wikidata I'm going to show how I've tried to integrate Wikidata into Wikipedia over the last 6 years. ie how Wikidata flows seemlessly into Wicipedia Cymraeg / the Welsh Wikipedia bringing it alive. One day, this will be the norm in every language, in my opinion. To me Wikidata and Wikibase on their own are absolutely meaningless! Why do I say that?
</p><p>Cymru -&gt; Wales 01-01 Wales has been a nation for 1500 years, and our forefathers, the Celts, lived here well before the Romans arrived. Around 700,000 of us speak Welsh fluently, and for many Welsh is their first language. Here in Wales, thanks to Wikimedia UK and WiciMon editing Wikipedia is on our national Curriculum, and the Welsh Government is very suportive of Wikimedia projects. Cymraeg / or the Welsh language is said by linguists to be one of the oldest living languages in Europe.
</p><p>1-59 In this video I'm going to look at, not only the use of Wikidata in infoboxes, but also how it flows seemlessly into some of our articles. I created a little project in 2016 whereby gender parity was reached on Wicipedia Cymraeg. Each one of these articles had a hidden template which would call up information from Wikidata and would appear as whole sentences in the articles. This allows the articles to grow automatically. The use of Wikidata in the article at that time was around 30%. The rest would be typed in manually. This one here calls up any awards given to the actress, artist or scientist as they appear on Wikidata.
</p><p>3-20 Nodyn:Authority control My first tip-toe into the waters of Wikidata was when I transposed Andy Mabbet's new Authority Control templates in early 2014: 6 and a half years ago.
</p><p>3-42 Take a look at the Welsh article on the Seren ddaear garpiog or the Geastrum corollinum, where the whole of this paragraph is taken from four properties on Wikidata. I could have placed all four directly in the article, but here I decided to have but one template, this one: Ffyngau (disgrifiad) which in turn has four subtemplates, each one a sentence, thus creating a whole paragraph of text. So if the info is there on Wikidata, it uses it; if the info is not there, it just doesn't appear in the article. In this case, the info is there and the whole paragraph is automatically generated from Wikidata.
</p><p>4-45 But let's turn to 100% Wikidata articles!
</p><p>In March this year, whole articles were created from 1 small template, which when dropped in any location, would create a small very acceptable article. The two words were Template:Testun lle (location text) and having created this template, I then used it on the article titled Autauga County, Alabama. Let's try it on the town of Prattville, Alabama. If I delete the existing text and drop the 'location text' template, we can immediately see that nearly all the information on Wikidata is taken in as whole sentences, and paragraphs on the Welsh Wikipedia. In other words 100% of what you see here comes from Wikidata. But how on earth could an editor add, subtract or amend this information?
</p><p>6-10 At first, this was an experiment, as I hadn't seen it being done on any other language Wikipedia. This one template was then broken down into subtemplates, all of them drawing their information from Wikidata, all of which can be simply edited by an user. Let's see these templates at work on Scott County, Virginia. I then used these templates, which draw a live feed from Wikidata, thus creating 24,000 new articles: each one taking more than 95% of their information from Wikidata.
</p><p>7-0 Let's look closer at this. On the right we have Template:Place, which I created around 3 years ago. This Wikidata infobox uses the Wikidata IB Module and the Wikidata template and can be used on any place with a geographical coordinates eg a river, a mountain, a town, even a county such as Brazil. This makes it much simpler for the editors, as they only have to remember the name of the template, in this case it's Template:Place.
</p><p>7-42 I've created 3 templates in Welsh: Persons, places and things. I think I'll create a 4th - species seperately from people. I see no reason to use 300 or more different infoboxes, as is done on the English Wikipedia.
</p><p>8-31 The maps in the body of the articles can be found here, and the code is now visible, so that an editor can change it, rather than having only one template / two words only on a page. The code is also explained fully.
</p><p>8-58 On Wicipedia Cymraeg, we use Wikidata Lists, a tool by Magnus Mansk, which takes the data from Wikidata into Wikipedia articles. This is disallowed in the Spanish, German, English and other Wikipedias. I added it on the Welsh Wikipedia in November 2016 - five years ago! I then added it onto a dozen other laguages. On Wicipedia Cymraeg, it's used mainly as a 'See also' section, whereby it can illustrate as well as bring in information which changes - such as population. So on the Scott County, Virginia it automatically changes every 24 hours using a tool called Listeria, and on bird articles, it edits and changes taxon names, even species names or the IUCN classification as soon as it's amended or updated on Wikidata. On the Prattville, Alabama article, I opted for a list of notable people.
</p><p>11-0 Wikipedia is about giving as well as taking. We have a partnership with Llen Natur, the main nature society in Wales, who also standardise names of species. By giving them a few lines of code, they were able to change their non-illustrated text only dictionary into something visually stunning. The Bywiadur is now an illustrated dictionary which takes images from Commons via Wikidata's prefered image.
</p><p>12-10 When a language becomes so big it can not make quick decissions it sinks into a quagmire of despair, but small languages can morph, adapt quickly, and evolve into a multicoloured bird. Samll is beautiful! Over the last 6 years Wicipedia Cymraeg has broken new ground by automatically updating information, so that no part of an article becomes redundant, out of date, incorrect. If an article on a town has the 2001 population, the reader will go elswhere. That's why we're adding the poulation from Wikidata, so that it changes automatically. With around 85% of our articles using Wikidata, we're well on road.
</p><p>13-21 I've created the templates but two other editors have done much of the spadework of getting the templates on Wikipedia: Sian EJ and Cell Danwydd, but all editors are now on board with this project and are streaming Wikidata into the Welsh Wikipedia; they're adding population feeds from Wikidata in the article text.
</p><p>13-48 To me Wikidata and Wikibase on their own are absolutely meaningless! The conected data sits in the cloud twiddling its thumbs. The beauty of Wikidata is its application and integration into other projects, used and consumed by readers of Wikipedia. We need all results of Wikidata Quieries in a format whereby they can be integrated into Wikipedia. For example, graphs and population charts driven by live Wikidata.
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That's all for now! Pob hwyl!
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