Logo of Wikidata

Welcome to Wikidata, Mrjohncummings!

Wikidata is a free knowledge base that you can edit! It can be read and edited by humans and machines alike and you can go to any item page now and add to this ever-growing database!

Need some help getting started? Here are some pages you can familiarize yourself with:

  • Introduction – An introduction to the project.
  • Wikidata tours – Interactive tutorials to show you how Wikidata works.
  • Community portal – The portal for community members.
  • User options – including the 'Babel' extension, to set your language preferences.
  • Contents – The main help page for editing and using the site.
  • Project chat – Discussions about the project.
  • Tools – A collection of user-developed tools to allow for easier completion of some tasks.

Please remember to sign your messages on talk pages by typing four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically insert your username and the date.

If you have any questions, don't hesitate to ask on Project chat. If you want to try out editing, you can use the sandbox to try. Once again, welcome, and I hope you quickly feel comfortable here, and become an active editor for Wikidata.

Best regards! Liuxinyu970226 (talk) 13:17, 6 December 2014 (UTC)Reply

WDPA category edit

I see that you proposed the creation of the UICN protected area category and de WDPA ID. These two properties are already created by WDPA ID (P809) and IUCN protected areas category (P814). --Fralambert (talk) 01:39, 4 February 2016 (UTC)Reply

@Fralambert: thanks very much, I'll withdraw the proposals. John Cummings (talk) 08:48, 4 February 2016 (UTC)Reply

Add a link to discussion navigation? edit

Hey :)

Want to add a link to the partnership chat to Template:Discussion navigation? And add it to the header like on Project chat? That could give it some more exposure. --Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) (talk) 09:41, 19 February 2016 (UTC)Reply

@Lydia Pintscher (WMDE):, I'd love to but I can't work out the template, do you know how to do it? --John Cummings (talk) 13:50, 19 February 2016 (UTC)Reply
It seems this is the right place to edit it: https://www.wikidata.org/w/index.php?title=Template:Discussion_navigation/text&action=edit --Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) (talk) 15:57, 19 February 2016 (UTC)Reply
@Lydia Pintscher (WMDE):, great, thanks, before I press save, do you think the name is OK? Annoyingly it is too long to fit on 2 lines so makes all the others have a weird space underneath. Partnerships and imports fits on two lines but is 'imports' a bit vague? John Cummings (talk) 16:12, 19 February 2016 (UTC)Reply
I'd say be bold and use imports and see if anyone comes up with something better ;-) I don't have a better short word atm either unfortunately. --Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) (talk) 16:27, 19 February 2016 (UTC)Reply
@Lydia Pintscher (WMDE):, I've saved it but doesn't seem to have changed the links on project chat....any ideas? John Cummings (talk) 16:33, 19 February 2016 (UTC)Reply
@Lydia Pintscher (WMDE):, well I don't know what the issue was but it seems to be fixed now :) --John Cummings (talk) 10:08, 21 February 2016 (UTC)Reply
It might need a purge or even translation admin to approve the new version. --Lydia Pintscher (WMDE) (talk) 16:45, 19 February 2016 (UTC)Reply

Unseco heritage Africa #list=148 edit

Hi, i added w:Ambohimanga on swwiki; and I think you may have overlooked w:Kilwa Kisiwani in swwiki, but also other languages. Cheers Kipala (talk) 08:57, 29 April 2016 (UTC)Reply

Thanks very much @Kipala:, yes I think there are are probably some missing across other languages as well that aren't linked to their Wikidata items, I don't really know how to check, any ideas? John Cummings (talk) 09:37, 29 April 2016 (UTC)Reply

Pipe in descriptions edit

Hi John Cummings,

A comma might be more suitable for descriptions than a pipe ("|"), e.g. at Q22806719. I'm not sure if "Biosphere" should have a caps or not. If it's a designation, probably yes.
--- Jura 14:28, 2 June 2016 (UTC)Reply

@Jura1: yes I think you are right, its there any way to change them en mass? They were all imported through Mix n' Match so I may have made a mistake in the spreadsheet and got pipes no commas. John Cummings (talk) 14:47, 2 June 2016 (UTC)Reply
With QuickStatements ("Den") or by bot.
--- Jura 14:53, 2 June 2016 (UTC)Reply

Pywikibot edit

Hey! I am planning to follow up with all the participants of the Pywikibot Training session. I will add the part about the new PAWS interface sometime this week (https://paws.wmflabs.org/paws/hub/login). Can you try to go through the (Wikidata:Pywikibot - Python 3 Tutorial) tutorial (minus the installation part, use PAWS) and maybe comment on your learning experience? You can also start a discussion about what data you want to import and what the difficulties are. I am sure you will be a very competent bot operator soon! --Tobias1984 (talk) 10:59, 28 June 2016 (UTC)Reply

Waddensea Area UNESCO biosphere reserve edit

Hi John,

We have one UNESCO Biosphere reserve in the Netherlands: The Waddensea Area.
I tried to link Q22678672 to the English wikipedia article: w:en:Wadden Sea, but that does not work. The message I get is that I have to "merge". But I don't know how to do that. Can you please help? Thank you. --Dick Bos (talk) 09:46, 19 July 2016 (UTC)Reply

Dick Bos, which one you want to merge with? A--> B? MechQuester (talk) 04:50, 9 December 2016 (UTC)Reply

Dick Bos and MechQuester, I've merged the items, I think I may have merged them the wrong way round (don't know if that matters?). --John Cummings (talk) 09:10, 9 December 2016 (UTC)Reply
Dont think it matters that much as long as the redirect points it to the content. MechQuester (talk) 13:16, 9 December 2016 (UTC)Reply
Thanks MechQuester, that's what I thought, I wasn't sure if there was a rule written somewhere about merging to the oldest item, but I couldn't find anything. --John Cummings (talk) 14:01, 9 December 2016 (UTC)Reply

Unused property edit

This is a kind reminder that the following property was created more than six months ago: number of out-of-school children (P2573). As of today, this property is used on less than five items. As the proposer of this property you probably want to change the unfortunate situation by adding a few statements to items. --Pasleim (talk) 19:16, 17 January 2017 (UTC)Reply

Almost empty items edit

Hey John Cummings, you have recently created a bunch of new items which seem to be useful for something. However, many of them neither have statements nor sitelinks which makes it difficult to use them properly. Could you please add at least some basic claims to them? You can find a list of affected items (55 right now) in this Petscan query. Thanks and regards, MisterSynergy (talk) 07:30, 4 June 2017 (UTC)Reply

Hi MisterSynergy, yes, they're from a Mix n' Match catalogue that I'm currently working through for UNESCO lists of Intangible Cultural Heritage and the Register of good safeguarding practices. Once all the items have been matched the data for the items will be added.
Thanks
--John Cummings (talk) 15:39, 4 June 2017 (UTC)Reply

UNESCO AWLD edit

I think I've found a record. Mohawk (Q13339) has seven AWLD IDs, and I managed to map them all to specific places. That was fun ... - PKM (talk) 01:56, 10 June 2017 (UTC)Reply

Hi PKM, thanks very much for working on this. The reason this has happened is that there are several Mohawk (Q13339) dialects which AWLD has separate entries for. I guess Wikidata should have separate entries for each dialect and then they should be part of (P361) Mohawk (Q13339). The way I found explored the information for Mohawk is pasting the name into the AWLD map [here http://www.unesco.org/languages-atlas/index.php]. I think this is likely to happen quite a lot when importing this database so I will do a query after it has all been done to find entries with multiple AWLD IDs and separate them out.
Thanks again
John Cummings (talk) 06:53, 10 June 2017 (UTC)Reply
That sounds like an excellent long-term plan for the dialects.- PKM (talk) 19:09, 10 June 2017 (UTC)Reply

The only "trick" I used is Mix'n'Match on the iPad - iPad interface makes copying the Qnnn without the parentheses fast (tap the ID anywhere instead of selecting specific characters). Otherwise all done by hand, curled up on the sofa. And linguistics is an old passion of mine, which probably gave me a leg-up on finding matches. - PKM (talk) 23:11, 24 June 2017 (UTC)Reply

How do I get Wikidata:Living people (draft) to look great? edit

@John Cummings: your latest document that explain various aspects of Wikidata look great. Where do you get your images? I'm currently working on Wikidata:Living people (draft) and I'm thinking that it would be nice if the policy document could be made to look as great as your documentation. ChristianKl () 11:16, 7 December 2017 (UTC)Reply

Thanks ChristianKl, they come from The Noun Project and I just import them to Commons individually here when I need them. I'm currently talking to African Hope about using a bot to scrape the images into Commons, if you know how to do that sort of thing, we are discussing it here :). Thanks again, --John Cummings (talk) 12:39, 7 December 2017 (UTC)Reply

Wikidata:Property_proposal/broader_concept edit

Pinging you (amongst others) since I know you've been doing some work on the UNESCO thesaurus, as to whether or not you think it would be useful to be able to record the "broader" field in thesauruses like this, allowing one to reference the thesaurus structure in WDQS queries. Property proposal at Wikidata:Property_proposal/broader_concept. Jheald (talk) 19:09, 10 February 2018 (UTC)Reply

Thanks very much for the ping @Jheald:, I think what you have brought up is super important and needs some serious thought by quite a few people, I've added a comment. Let me know where I can be helpful :) --John Cummings (talk) 00:28, 11 February 2018 (UTC)Reply

A geoshape for every country edit

Hi John,

Following the recent discussion about adding a set of country level geojson polygon data to Commons I've created geoshapes using this dataset: https://datahub.io/core/geo-countries. The ingest is completed; each geoshape is linked to the corresponding Wikidata item and can be retrieved with a query. Here are a few examples:

Is this the sort of visualisation you had in mind? Simon Cobb (Sic19 ; talk page) 21:31, 31 May 2018 (UTC)Reply

@Sic19:, these are amazing :) (@NavinoEvans: for interest). Please could you tell people about this on village pump? This new option for queries needs to be written down somewhere obvious, but I'm not sure where.... Maybe include that question in the village pump message? --John Cummings (talk) 15:31, 1 June 2018 (UTC)Reply

Help content edit

Just to let you know: Help:Modelling is now in at least reasonable shape; this is part of my effort to fill in some of the "help deficit" we discussed at the 2018 Wikimedia Conference. I know it's a very different angle than what you are working on, but I think you might find it interesting. - Jmabel (talk) 01:44, 3 August 2018 (UTC)Reply

@Jmabel:, really great stuff, I'll have a proper look in the next few days and come back to you, this was the next thing on my Wikidata to do list, very happy you've done it :) John Cummings (talk) 19:12, 3 August 2018 (UTC)Reply

Hi @Jmabel:

So me and Nav had a discussion about it and we think its great, we have some suggestions for changes and additions and a new thing that is related. We are still working on improving documentation and are very happy to collaborate with you on things.

  • It's good to see that target audience has been specified ("moderate-to-expert experience in data modeling"), but obviously it would be nice to have pages for the much larger audience with "no experience in data modelling" as well. We do need to provide information for both otherwise the community cannot grow, we think this is where the Wikidata Tours comes in, perhaps some of Help:Modelling/General should be turned into Wikidata Tours. We are currently working on adding some new tours so once we learn how to do it we can do some work on this.
  • One way to organise the domains is to have a portal page with links to all the main domain pages, maybe with icons like I've done for Wikidata:Dataset Imports.
  • Having some kind of link from each example to the community discussion on the way this kind of data is modelled is important, otherwise its going to be confusing and probably people will try and do all the community discussion on the talk page which will go nowhere. Perhaps there should be a new space for this, not sure.
  • The claims template is really compact but additional squids etc are a bit confusing, the Statement+ template showing the same as how it looks on the item pages is super helpful, especially for less experienced users.

Proposal for a new property for model items edit

So the basic idea is to highlight items that are examples of correct modelling, kind of like featured items but for specific topics. These would be labelled through a new property which would be added to the item for the concept e.g Train, and then people could look at the item and know how to model that kind of item. This could be as granular as needed e.g a model item for 'person' and a model item for '18th Century poet'

I think this could then be used in a template (e.g Statement+) which fetches the 'model item' using the instance of statement.

I think this would help people to both understand what the modelling conventions are for different subjects more easily and also to copy them.

Thoughts?

John Cummings (talk) 19:14, 6 August 2018 (UTC)Reply

Withdrawn US Biosphere Reserves edit

I just stumbled across the news that the US withdrew 17 biosphere reserves from MAB in June 2017. [1] I guess the thing to do is add start and end times to the “member of” statements and make sure we have entries for the sites under their NPS or USFS designations. Anything else we need to think about? - PKM (talk) 07:57, 2 September 2018 (UTC)Reply

I've added the UNESCO press release on this change as 23 new sites added to UNESCO’s World Network of Biosphere Reserves (Q56438722), to use as reference. - PKM (talk) 19:38, 2 September 2018 (UTC)Reply
Central Plains (Q22673891) is an example where the item (and ENwiki article) is specifically about the Biosphere reserve; I have created Central Plains Experimental Range (Q56439730) and linked the two. Coram Experimental Forest (Q5169629) is an example where the MAB data was added to an existing item on the (surviving) experimental forest. Do you think it is best practice to separate Coram into two items as well? - PKM (talk) 21:41, 2 September 2018 (UTC)Reply
@PKM:, thanks very much, using existing items or adding new items is a really hard choice, the BRs ca be called the same thing and cover a different geographic region, or be called something different and cover the same geographic region, sometimes this information isn't public or is hard to find. My guess is that they should all be seperated out as individual items once geoshapes become more usable on Wikidata. I think I'll go through them all with the BR team to see whats best. Thanks again, --John Cummings (talk) 09:08, 3 September 2018 (UTC)Reply
Sounds good. I’ll continue updating the enwiki articles and add the “end dates” to existing items as I go. Let me know if you decide on separation as the best way forward; I am happy to work on that. - PKM (talk) 19:37, 3 September 2018 (UTC)Reply

Geoshape documentation edit

Hi John,

Thanks for your help with the documentation. I will continued to add to it but wanted to flag that I might not be very active during the next week as I'm going to be away at WikiCite. Cheers Simon Cobb (User:Sic19 ; talk page) 22:17, 21 November 2018 (UTC)Reply

@Sic19: no problem, its a pleasure, I think we are nearly there :) No problem with the delay, if you do meet people at Wikicite who you think could add content please do show them it. --John Cummings (talk) 10:26, 22 November 2018 (UTC)Reply

Hungarian sites on protectedplant.net edit

Hi, you have made a mistake. You have imported in Wikidata the Hungarian sites on protectedplant.net with wrong properties. Your import have used property P808 Bien de Interés Cultural (BIC) code, but the correct property should be: P809 WDPA ID. Unfortunately I have noticed this failure after that I have matched manually about 50 items. I am not familiar with the upload to Mix'n'match so I ask you correct your failure! For eexample see Q1009672 There You could verify the links. Texaner (talk) 19:37, 1 December 2018 (UTC)Reply

Wikidata query example for Local Authorities in England edit

I see in your Geoshapes notes you have a link to a query for Local Authority areas in England. Here is an alternative version of that query which might provide a better version of this map as it provides a link directly to the query result and colours each area differently. Hope this is of some help. Owenpatel (talk) 00:01, 6 December 2018 (UTC)Reply

Thanks very much @Owenpatel:, this is super helpful. Do you know how to convert this into a Kartographer map like the one at the top of the page? Thanks again --John Cummings (talk) 09:24, 6 December 2018 (UTC)Reply
I've not used the Kartographer extension, but it looks to me that while it can currently work with map data from the Commons, and can map Wikidata query results when the referenced items have Wikidata IDs in OpenStreetMap, it doesn't seem that it can currently deal with the situation where the Wikidata items have a map file on the commons. However, not being that familiar with Kartographer, I may well have missed something so could be worth asking on the Kartographer talk page Owenpatel (talk) 09:52, 6 December 2018 (UTC)Reply

Year edit

I noticed you designated 2000 (Q1985) and 2018 (Q25291) as model items for year (Q577). But that item is the time it takes the Earth to orbit the Sun. I believe items such as 2000 and 2001 should be considered calendar year (Q3186692), not years. Jc3s5h (talk) 13:38, 20 December 2018 (UTC)Reply

@Jc3s5h: thanks very much for catching my mistake :) Corrected. --John Cummings (talk) 13:54, 20 December 2018 (UTC)Reply

DOAJ catalog edit

John — I'm making heavy use of Directory of Open Access Journals ID (P5115) now for filtering medical articles, and have been adding it today by hand. Last year you added a dataset of journals as catalog 1070 on mix'n'match. That was 7,775 of them, and https://doaj.org/ today says they cover 12,955.

So I wondered if there was any prospect of you adding more to mix'n'match. Charles Matthews (talk) 11:12, 3 April 2019 (UTC)Reply

@NavinoEvans: is the man to ask, I'm just the button presser on Mix n' Match. --John Cummings (talk) 20:47, 3 April 2019 (UTC)Reply

Messy property proposals edit

Wikidata:Property proposal/PARADISEC Catalog and Wikidata:Property proposal/ELAR ID seem to have been created in a hurry. Can you please correct them? Multichill (talk) 20:07, 27 January 2020 (UTC)Reply

Hi @Multichill:, the issue isn't time, the issue is lack of instructions on what to actually write in each one or how to format the information, <!-- {{Q|1}} → value --> is the only information to go on and I don't know what to do with it. I've asked on the talk page for property proposals for someone to improve the instructions, hopefully this will make it easier for everyone to join in. --John Cummings (talk) 01:10, 28 January 2020 (UTC)Reply
John, you left most of the fields empty. You can just look at what got filled out in other property proposals and copy that. In this state it will just be closed.
We already have thousands of properties and we already get more property proposal than we can handle at the moment. Not sure any barrier for entry needs to be lowered. Multichill (talk) 19:42, 28 January 2020 (UTC)Reply
On your PARADISEC Catalog proposal: PARADISEC seems to contain "collections" and "items". which type of record do you want to link to with your new proposal? It doesn't look like any of these would have Wikidata items now - are you planning to import some? - PKM (talk) 20:39, 28 January 2020 (UTC)Reply

Linking curriculum and resources edit

Hi John. Very happy to discuss this project further and suggest some contacts. Does it link to UNESCO Global Education Coalition? Pru.mitchell (talk) 15:36, 12 April 2020 (UTC)Reply

Wikidata:Tours/References edit

Good evening! most probably I have been doing some unintended wrong editions on the page by trying to translate it into Norwegian. can you check and revert if neccesary! Breg Pmt (talk) 21:59, 23 May 2020 (UTC)Reply

Hi @Pmt: no problem at all, I reverted the English version to the last version before the edits. I wrote some instructions on how to create new translations of existing tours at Wikidata:How to create Wikidata Tours/Translate, please can you let me know if they work for you and make sense, I'm also a little worried there are bugs in the Tour software still to find. Thanks, --John Cummings (talk) 22:20, 23 May 2020 (UTC)Reply
@John Cummings: I have made a rough translation with the page https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:How_to_create_Wikidata_Tours/nb into norwegian During this week I will continue to work on it to get it ready for correction. But now I want to translate the Live refernce tour. But I am not able to Reach this page and put it into a translation modus. It kind of stops when I Reach the blue square saying
Not your language This tour is not available in your language. You may proceed using English or translate it into your language. Can you guide me further.This tour is specially needed on Norwegian wikipedia since References there is inported from wikidata into infoboxes in a large scale. I will of course try to handle both and give priority to the pages for [[Wikidata:How to create Wikidata Tours/Translate. Breg Pmt (talk) 18:15, 26 May 2020 (UTC)Reply
@Pmt: it looks like something is broken in the software, let me ask around to see how to fix it, sorry this keeps not working... --John Cummings (talk) 19:06, 26 May 2020 (UTC)Reply
@John Cummings: There will always be other translations. Trur eg... Bokmål (Q25167) is done but Nynorsk (Q25164) is more needed, Riksmål (Q37015) NOT. Breg Pmt (talk) 19:14, 26 May 2020 (UTC)Reply
@Pmt: it should now be fixed (fingers crossed), to translate a tour see the translate link under the big blue button to start a tour on Wikidata:Tours. --John Cummings (talk) 22:32, 27 May 2020 (UTC)Reply
@John Cummings: Seems to be working no. Thank you! Breg Pmt (talk) 23:00, 27 May 2020 (UTC)Reply

Tour On the norwegian front pages edit

Good evening! Do you think it is possible to add an "live and linked" picture of the startpage for Wikidata tours in norwegian on the norwegian project and discussion pages? Also pinging @Jon Harald Søby (WMNO), Jeblad:. Breg Pmt (talk) 21:19, 11 August 2020 (UTC)Reply

Hi @Pmt: really nice to hear from you, I'm sorry I don't understand what you mean, maybe could you show me? Sorry for the confusion. --John Cummings (talk) 21:21, 11 August 2020 (UTC)Reply
The background is as follows; Users on norwegian wikipedia often "complains" that starting editing on Wikidata has a high treshold. So if there was a kind of window hoovering on the pages with a clickable link to start the tour new users could have an easy way into different tours. Like the picture down in the left corner on my userpage. An ordinary link I think will be quickly overseen. Pmt (talk) 21:39, 11 August 2020 (UTC)Reply

FindingGLAMs/GLAM statistics Update edit

Hi John Wikidata Taiwan (Q65555605) already keep this project in Taiwan for several month. Can you update FindingGLAMs/GLAM statistics to help us to track our result. Thank you, for more information about Finding GLAM Taiwan you can find here.

Hi @Allenwang6212a:, could you describe a little more about what you did and how you modelled the data? I'm working on something that will help keep the map updated automatically, hopefully finished soon. --John Cummings (talk) 21:23, 11 August 2020 (UTC)Reply

William Osman (Q45321869) notability? edit

Just wondering how this person meets the criteria for inclusion per wikidata:notability. It isn't evident to me.  — billinghurst sDrewth 00:24, 12 September 2020 (UTC)Reply

Hi, just wondering about this one still. Thanks.  — billinghurst sDrewth 13:06, 6 October 2020 (UTC)Reply
Sorry to miss this before, yes under 2, I've added some references. --John Cummings (talk) 14:05, 6 October 2020 (UTC)Reply

Translation to norwegian edit

Good evening, Do you know a way or example table to save and list the expression I made when translating from english to norwegian nb and nn. I am thinking of expressions like type constraint, (typebegrensning) allowed qualifiers constraint tillat egenbegrensningskvalifikator, and so on. An table is ok, but tiresome to handle. Breg Pmt (talk) 17:07, 1 November 2020 (UTC)Reply

good morning. I think i found something. https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Glossary/nb. So I will start from there. Breg Pmt (talk) 07:19, 2 November 2020 (UTC)Reply
Hi Pmt nice to hear from you, I'm sorry I don't know, maybe someone on Project chat would know? --John Cummings (talk) 15:38, 6 November 2020 (UTC)Reply

Intangible heritage edit

Hi! I have gone through the entire lists of Unesco intangible heritage and matched them to Wikidata in OpenRefine. I could create a wikiproject and/or a dataset import for it to coordinate with others working on the same topic, regarding item structure or other conventions, and to avoud overlapping work. Would you agree that a wikiproject would be useful? Cheers, Susanna Ånäs (Susannaanas) (talk) 11:20, 25 June 2022 (UTC)Reply

Hi Susannaanas that's amazing, which lists did you use? It would be great to have this written down somewhere, really up to you of the best way of doing it, maybe ask on project chat for if there's an existing suitable place? Also if you have any questions about any of the data let me know, I may know or may be able to ask someone at UNESCO. Thanks again :) John Cummings (talk) 08:36, 27 June 2022 (UTC)Reply

I have scraped the Unesco pages at https://ich.unesco.org/en/lists myself, the data includes names in en, fr, and es, with links to info pages, the three lists, domains, designation year, countries, and Unesco keywords and themes (which I am not going to use for the moment: tags, SDGs, related world heritage sites, biomes). I have constructed the Unesco ICH IDs from the link numerals and lists.
There's a lot of discrepancy in the ways in which items have been described, and linked items seem to have changed meaning along the way, and not consistently across languages (intangible heritage / the lists combined / the lists individually). I will start the work and announce it on Project chat. Thanks, cheers, Susanna Ånäs (Susannaanas) (talk) 13:05, 27 June 2022 (UTC)Reply