In what could easily be a recurring annual trip,Matt Senate, and I came to Berlin this week to participate in Open Knowledge Festival. We spoke at the csv,conf a fringe event in its first year, ostensibly about the comma separated values, but more so about unusual data hacking. On behalf of WikiProject Open Access - Signalling OA-ness team, we generalized our experience in data-munging with Wikimedia projects for the new user. We were asked to make the talk more story-oriented than technical; and since we were in Germany, we decided to use that famous narrative of Häskell and Grepl. In broad strokes we go through: how Wikimedia projects work, history of Wiki Data-Hacking, from “Ignore All Rules” to calcification, Wikidata told as Hänsel and Gretel, signalling OA-ness, how you could do it too.
These are the full slides (although slide show does not seem to like our Open Office document so much):
And a crowdsourced recording of the session:
We missed half of lunch with the queue of questions extending past our sessions, which was fabulous to see such interest. There is a particular affinity we found with the Content Mine initiative, which wants to programmatically extract facts from papers. Since we are finding and uploading mine-able papers, you could imagine some sort of suggestion system which says to an editor "you cited [fact x] from this paper, do you also want to cite [extracted facts] in the Wikipedia article too?". Let's work to make that system a fact in itself.
notconfusing.com