Wikidata:WikiProject LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group/Affinity Group Calls/Meeting Notes/2019-11-05

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Call details[edit]

Presentation material[edit]

Notes[edit]

  • Notability
    • Wikidata tries to capture top levels of FRBR
    • You wouldn’t normally capture individual items in Wikidata unless they are special collections material--not mass-produced things
  • Showcase query https://w.wiki/BQG
    • Shows us that google books has this book and --could look for later editions of political books that Google books has
  • Mass-produced books not generally notable
  • An individual biography in A Dictionary of the Booksellers and Printers - just two lines of text! - is notable enough for Wikidata
    • Anything that has a page on any of the Wikimedia projects can be represented in Wikidata
    • This book has a page in Wikisource, and so does each individual biography
  • Wikisource
    • Free library--bit like Gutenberg, but better
    • Any freely available text is in scope
    • It’s a community who do volunteer to share knowledge and promote research
    • Take scans of a book and fix OCR (optical character recognition)
      • Fixed by human users to make a verified electronic version of the text
      • Different than wikipedia--just judging what text is visible on page and capturing some of the layout and appearance
      • Transcription project going on now for 1860 Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
        • Yellow means page is fair representation of text
        • Yellow then becomes promoted to green once checked by 2 users
        • Blue pages have something complicated--an image, page not legible, etc
        • Big task of transcribing book is broken into small pieces that community can contribute to
        • Made available in ebook formats that people can download
    • Wikidata and Wikisource
      • Book editions have Wikidata representations
      • Author profiles and topic profiles
        • Author--get birth and death years
        • Authority control links
        • Wikipedia article
        • All of this information drawn in from Wikidata
    • Biggest achievement of english Wikisource (French is biggest) is out of copyright Dictionary of National Biography (nation is UK)
      • Has 30,000 biographies
      • Whole thing has been transcribed and individually bookmarkable on Wikisource and on Wikidata
      • Can be treated like a database
        • https://w.wiki/BQf
        • Can do queries to find people in this resource and another bibliographic source
    • Lots of biographical dictionaries in progress
    • Wanted to add a biographical dictionary
      • The Plomer Dictionary: a dictionary of booksellers and printers who were at work in England, Scotland, and Ireland from 1641-1667
      • Imported the scans to Wikisource
      • Announced in staff letter at Oxford that they were doing this and Wikisource community contributed as well
        • Only needed to be able to recognize English to do this task
      • Once have corrected text, need to mark up the structure of the book--pseudo xml syntax for describing the different chunks of the book
        • Colleague Kat Steiner went though and did it for the whole book
        • Created table of contents with biographies
        • Biographies could then be represented in Wikidata
        • Wanted to add the people from the book to Wikidata
          • Used OpenRefine
          • Used GoogleSheets to do it
            • Extensions enable you to do look-ups to any API
              • Could describe a series of steps and processing take link to biography in Wikisource to get the text of biography and do different tests on it
              • Get the name of the person
              • Get that they’re a human being
              • If there’s a 4 digit number, flourishing date
              • Bookseller or printer appear in first sentence, then they’re the occupation of the person
              • If the place names appear, then those are the workplace of the person
              • Used the spreadsheet to extract some properties from the text
              • Fed into QuickStatements
          • Queries like people described in the book who worked in publishing in Oxford visualized as timeline https://w.wiki/BQN
      • Flora Graeca (The Sibthorp & Bauer Expedition)
        • Botanical book with paintings of plants, represented in Wikidata as hundreds of art works that are “published in” the book.
        • Gave different ways for content of book to be explored and presented
        • Each painting deserves a Wikidata item.
        • Wikidata has tree of life info and species are part of a genus, family, etc.
        • One could ask for all images in book that depict species in a given family. Wikidata knows which species are in which family- we don’t have to supply this.
        • Can get common names from Wikidata
        • Got coordinates from Wikidata for Mediterranean and visualise on map

Questions[edit]

  • Question from Jackie--CML encoding at Oxford?
    • Martin--a lot of efforts around this at Oxford. Wikisource is providing definitive versions of text--just gets text in form that’s readable, not TEI, but helps to have correct version of text before marking up in TEI--can play a part in the process, but performs a different function. Wikisource likes to compare the text against images in terms of formatting like font size. Feminism portal on Wikisource--Martin was able to add some texts from Oxford. Moving text from Oxford to Wikisource strips out some mark-up, shown to broader audience. Wikidata can point people to versions of a text at various institutions
  • Jackie-How is it possible to express relationship between versions?
    • Full text online at
    • Different identifiers like Project Gutenberg, Google Books
    • Edition or version of property
      • Properties attached to the editions
      • Digital surrogate would be attached to the edition
  • Jackie-Entity reconciliation to avoid duplicates before importing
    • Recommends using OpenRefine for reconciliation, so you can do reconciliation before import
    • Martin manually merged duplicates after importing--not best practice, but can be fixed
  • Martin has created showcase examples https://w.wiki/BQG
    • MacCauley edition
  • Karen-Do you record copy-specific info for a particular edition?
    • Record on Commons will say where book has come from, so text can be traced to a specific university library
    • WikiSource isn’t interested in transcribing marginalia, but gives a paper trail to that specific item
  • Liam--mentioned that WikiSource isn’t interested in marginalia. Is there a way to represent palimpsests in Wikidata?
    • Possible to add marginalia, but not core
    • Martin not aware of, but hasn’t been in the scope of his work at this point; maybe need a dedicated WikiProject for that
  • Does Wikisource have a way of dealing in transcription with text errors, non-standard spelling, etc. that could be problems for searching
    • You can sic tag--shows that you have corrected and you can mouse over and see the original
  • Where do Wikisource discussions happen?
    • Talk pages for transcription projects and finished online book are two different layers; talk pages for transcription projects are a place to discuss and whoever sets up the project can decide based on past work, etc. how best to transcribe the item
    • Had a transcription public event for Mary Somerville to transcribe a paper and part of a book by her. https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Author:Mary_Fairfax_Somerville
  • Jeff— query for palimpsest: https://w.wiki/BWf
  • Martin--We harness immense pedantry for peaceful ends--library and Wikimedia communities
  • Martin—”We harness the right kind of obsessive”
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