By Charles Matthews, Wikimedian in Residence at ContentMine With the end of October, Wikidata’s birthday comes round once more, and on the 29th it will be six years old. With the passing of time Wikimedia’s structured data site grows, is supported by an increasingly mature set of key tools, and is applied in new directions…. read more »
By Ruth Jenkins, Academic Support Librarian at the University of Edinburgh. For some time, Wikipedia has been shown to be a resource to engage with, rather than avoid. Wikipedia is heavily used for medical information by students and health professionals – and the fact that it is openly available is crucial for people finding health information, particularly in developing countries… read more »
Science Source is a new project by ContentMine which builds on their previous work on WikiFactMine, which wanted to ‘make Wikidata the primary resource for identifying objects in bioscience’. This time, they want to automate the process of looking at biomedical research to identify statements that would be useful for improving Wikipedia’s medical articles. They… read more »
I was scrolling Twitter when I came across a video of a fighter in Syria wasting ammunition to destroy an ancient Byzantine building. Jihadists in Idlib, Syria, destroy what’s left of a Byzantium era archaeological building in Deir Sunbul. The site is part of the “Dead Cities,” and is on UNESCO World Heritage List.https://t.co/LozBibwuIG pic.twitter.com/DE54KKOHQk… read more »
Earlier this month, I was fortunate enough to be invited to the Project Launch of of GB1900; the first ever historical gazetteer of the entirety of Great Britain, capturing the isles between the years 1888 to 1914. I was invited by Humphrey Southall, Professor of Historical Geography at the University of Portsmouth. Dr Southall, who… read more »
By Lorna M. Campbell, University of Edinburgh Earlier this spring I was honoured to be invited to keynote at three open knowledge conferences in the UK and Ireland, which presented a great opportunity to highlight the work of the Wikimedia community to a wide and diverse audience. The first event was the OER18 Open for… read more »
By Delphine Dallison, Wikimedian in Residence at the Scottish Libraries and Information Council (SLIC) At the beginning of July, I attended the Celtic Knot 2018 conference at the National Library of Wales in Aberystwyth organised in partnership with Wikimedia UK. As a Wikidata novice, but enthusiast, I was excited to see that the conference had… read more »
Mike Peel is a UK Wikimedian who is running a session on the development of multilingual infoboxes on Wikimedia Commons at Wikimania 2018 in Cape Town. You can see the session information here. _____________________________________________________ Wikimedia Commons is a multilingual repository holding multimedia related to all possible topics. All language Wikipedias, as well as other projects,… read more »
One account I follow on Twitter which produces very useful political maps is @ElectionMapsUK. I saw the account tweeting recently that after they had finished all their maps showing the changes to council seats and the makeup of borough councils after the 2018 local elections. The account announced that they were happy for other people… read more »
Background This report assumes that you know basically what HTTPS is, among other things. ‘We’ is used liberally in this post, and refers to the Wikimedia technical community in general – I am a volunteer and I don’t work for the foundation or any national chapters. Wikimedia has several canonical domain names, the ones everyone… read more »