Fremantle
· LoveData2024 · Wikimedia · WMAU ·
It's Love Data Week this week! Not data about love, but about how we all love data. Wikidata, mainly.
The thing I'm excited about this week with Wikidata is a project that I'm working on that involves adding sources to various statements, and I'm then building a bibliography list directly from that. Of course it's possible to do this with a single Sparql query but I'm finding that I keep hitting the timeout and so am doing it a bit hacky: looping through my items (which are cached and updated weekly) and looking for the references to the statements that I want to include, and manually excluding duplicates. Then it's reasonably easy (well… I've not actually finished yet so I might be wrong about that) to do a sort of CiteQ type of thing to output the bibliography.
This has the advantages of both not having to maintain a separate list of references, and also it means that I discover references that other people have added or ones that I've added but forgotten about. The formatting of the bibliography is useful too because it requires all the bits of the reference to be there and so I have to go back and fix up references that are lacking (slightly tedious but usually worthwhile because there's other stuff that can be added to those items).