Wikidata

User:Giantflightlessbirds/Wikidata Fellowship 2023

< User:Giantflightlessbirds

I was awarded a 2023 Wikimedia Australia Wikidata Fellowship to work on the following project.

New Zealand works in the public domain edit

New Zealand recently agreed to extend its copyright term from 50 to 70 years after death; the change will take effect in about 2025. So for a few more years New Zealand authors will continue to enter the public domain—but we don't celebrate this fact or draw attention to the works the way Americans do with Public Domain Day. I plan to work with an institution to make digitised New Zealand books available on a local server for New Zealanders to download for free—but to do this, I needed a list of authors whose copyrights are about to expire, 50 years after their death.

I ran a simple SPARQL query and managed to find enough names to populate a Google document but shortly after sharing it Alex Lum came along and expanded it significantly, obviously using superior SPARQL skills.

As part of the West Coast Wikisource project, I found myself creating numerous Wikidata items for authors, works, and editions of out-of-copyright books—and in many cases the publisher and printer too. Wikidata's modelling of New Zealand literature seems to be quite poor, and even when an author and their date of death are present in Wikidata there are few other properties, and usually none of their creative works.

Goal of this project edit

For this project, I would like to spend some time improving the coverage of New Zealanders whose copyrights have just expired, or will before the term extension; and learn how to reliably query and display that dataset.

  1. Taking the opportunity to learn SPARQL properly and practice constructing queries. I have Bob DuCharme's O'Reilly manual on learning SPARQL, and numerous Wikidata examples and tutorials, but could use assistance in the formulation and syntax of specific queries.
  2. Generating lists with Listeria, tables with Integraality, and bulk-editing items with TABernacle and OpenRefine.
  3. Making an improved working list from Wikidata of New Zealanders for the Public Domain Day project. I could possible just tag authors as on focus list of Wikimedia project (P5008), and define this fellowship as a project.
  4. Finding works by these authors, or finding authors with Wikidata (or no works), and creating Wikidata items for their key works and editions (books, music, art).
  5. Correcting the copyright status property for each person—some are clearly out of date, for example with Rita Angus who died in 1970 but whose Wikidata item states her work in still in copyright in countries with terms of 50 or more years pma. We will need a procedure for annually updating these properties with our target list as their copyrights expire in NZ.
  6. Generating timelines with Histropedia ideally with author photos from Wikidata to depict copyrights expiring.
  7. When copyrights expiring over the next three years are complete, work backwards using the same techniques over the last few years.
  8. Present a report for the Public Domain Day grant proposal with maps, charts, and timelines generated from Wikidata queries.

The project raises several questions: Who counts as a New Zealand copyright creator? James Ranalph Jackson (Q6141837) was born in NZ, but left at the age of 8, did all his creative work in Australia and the UK, and never returned. Should he be on our list? What about someone who was born overseas but emigrated here, like Sydney G. Attwell (Q63283168)? Or someone who spent some time in NZ and did major creative work inspired by their time here, like Anna Kavan (Q287679)?

Resources edit

Test SPARQL queries edit

Progress edit

  1. 20 April 2023: After a couple of sessions with Toby, I've explored SPARQL queries from the list above, created a table of NZ occupations in Integraality, and learned that RDFS stands for Resource Description Framework Schema. I now have, thanks to Toby, a basic query to explore, NZers copyright creators who died 1972–1975 who have either works in Wikidata, creator IDs, or a copyright status as creators.
  2. 20 May 2023: Using What Links Here to check my list of authors for any of their work already in Wikidata (and uncovering lots of misattributed work, like a screenplay Ronald Hugh Morrieson apparently wrote ten years after he died). Using this to create a Google Sheet of works for a subset of authors for OpenRefine.
  3. 29 May 2023: Checking the list of NZ creators returned by Query 1 against the draft Public Domain Countdown list. Tested embedding Query 1 in a Histropedia timeline and tweaking display. Uploaded selected works of James K. Baxter, Ronald Hugh Morrieson, and Herries Beattie to Wikidata with OpenRefine and created SPARQL queries to returns lists for each.
  4. 7 June 2023: Experimented with reformatting SPARQL queries and returning different lists of works.

Outcomes edit

See also edit

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