APUG Meetup March 2022

This month's APUG session

Our next session will take place on 09 March 2022. It will start at 18:30.

The format is

18:30 Food (physical space)
18:45 Talk: Ian Watt - "Python and Wikidata - a match made in heaven?"
19:30 Project teams in break-out rooms (Beginner and Intermediate).
20:30 Project round-ups

all times are approximate.

Description

Wikidata is one of the largest, if not the largest, collaborative Linked Open Data databases in the world. It has almost 100million items in it. These represent about 12 billion data triples. Anyone can read from it (and it has a CC0 licence for re-use). Anyone with a Wiki(data)/(pedia) / Commons account can write to it. And like everything in the Wikimedia universe there are multiple ways to do any task. Tonight Ian will give a very brief introduction to Wikidata, but will focus mainly on a look at some Python libraries designed to interact with Wikidata. In the practical session we will try one of the libraries and extract some Wikidata for use in our own analysis. While you will not need to register for a Wikidata account to take part in the practical session, Ian does receommend that you register and get involved improving Wikidata quality.

Biography

Ian is a co-founder and trustee of Code The City a local charity which uses tech and data for civic good. He graduated with a Masters in Data Science from RGU. He is a Wikimedia UK trainer who has delivered courses in Wikipedia editing, the use of Wiki Commons, and Wikidata which is his favourite platform. He has over 100,000 Wikidata edits to his name. He is very keen on local and social history, and art, and recently worked with Aberdeen Art Gallery and Museums to upload 4,200 openly-licensed images of artworks in the collection) to Wiki Commons, each with corresponding Wikidata items.

Registration

We will have both a physical and online version of this meetup. If you select a physical ticket and it happens that we can not meet physically you will have to attend the Zoom session. If you choose a physical ticket you will have to comply with any conditions of attendance (eg masks or social distancing) that the venue operators demand at the time.

Tickets are by donation - we suggest £5 to help with the running costs of Code the City.

Monthly challenges

The project challenges will be announced on Github

Keep in touch

We recommend joining our Slack channel.

If you are a beginner looking to get started in Python have a look at our Learning Resources page where we recommend a free video course on Youtube.