Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2022-08-01/In focus

In focus

Wikidata insights from a handy little tool

Wikidata is a knowledge base associated with Wikipedia. Querying Wikidata to get insights is a very hard job. Fortunately, the Item documentation template can help querying Wikidata in one click using generic queries. The template is now automatically displayed in the header of each item's talk page.

Let's take an example. Imagine I want to complete an article about a small French town like Épinal. From the Wikipedia article, I can get to the Wikidata item Épinal (Q173695) using the menu. Then I can switch to the talk page Talk:Q173695. In the header of the talk page, I should see the item's documentation.

In the first section, I can find a link to a magic query which returns "All claims about Épinal" (try it, and don't forget to press the blue 'play' button). This provides an overview of all I can find about Épinal in Wikidata. For instance I get the list of items located in the administrative territorial entity Épinal, the list of people whose place of birth is Épinal, and the list of people whose place of death is Épinal.

In the first part of the template, I find a link to the query "All claims about Épinal"

Let's go further to the "Generic queries for administrative territorial entities" section. This section provides generic SPARQL queries for administrative territorial entities such as towns, regions, countries, and districts. It is generated using Template:TP administrative area. Clicking on "Places in Épinal", I can find a full list of items located in Épinal (see here).

In this part, I find many queries based on geography. For instance, the map of places or the list of organizations with their headquarters in Épinal.

Further down in the page, I find the list of "People born in Épinal, sorted by number of sitelinks" (see here). The number of sitelinks is the number of pages in the different wikipedias. This can be very useful to complete the "Notable people" section of the article.

Here we find queries related to people born in Épinal, dead in Épinal, living in Épinal or buried in Épinal.

Of course, Wikidata's data is not perfect. We should complete insights from Wikidata with reliable sources. But the Item documentation template makes it easier to get insights from Wikidata in order to complete Wikipedia articles. Any feedback about the template is welcome on the template's talk page.

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Eyewitness Wikimedian, Vinnytsia, Ukraine

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Oh, wow. Nobody told me the WD item talk page would be full of good stuff. Oh, I see it's not, for tugboats and buildings and asteroids and presumably for a lot of other items. But for people and civil subdivisions, yes. Very nice. It makes me wonder how hard it would be to learn enough SPARQL to take care of, well buildings and asteroids, anyway. Jim.henderson (talk) 16:55, 2 September 2022 (UTC)[reply]

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