The Signpost

News and notes

Swedish Wikimedia chapter organizes simultaneous Wikidata contests; FDC election results

This week has been a busy one for the Wikidata project, with nearly simultaneous Wikidata contests, both organized by Wikimedia Sweden, now underway.

The first contest is the Menu Challenge: in a post to the Wikimedia Blog project manager John Andersson recounted that "we are aiming at a list of vegetables, meat, fruits and other ingredients and cooking related terms that 30 restaurants will be serving at a food festival in Stockholm, Sweden in June. Wikimedia Sverige will be there to highlight how open data and crowdsourcing can benefit nearly every aspect of society." The idea is to create and to maintain experimental digital restaurant menus, based on a mock-up prepared by Wikidata user Denny some time ago. The challenge will be based around translations of Wikidata labels and the addition of images and pronunciations for ingredient items, and will take place between May 8 and 27. "Let’s get some #tastydata!"

The second of the two is the Wikidata visualization challenge, a competition meant to "make it easier to understand the value of Wikidata, what is in there, and/or how it is being created ... [by] visualizing interesting representations of the data in the database". As examples of what the competition organizers are looking for and of what the Wikidata dataset makes possible project manager points to the Listen to Wikipedia application, an aural visualization of editing activity throughout the projects; and to the Wikidata tempo-spatial display, a geographic visualization of event histories. More details on the competition, as well as the grand prize, a travel scholarship, are available here.

In related news, an update to the Reasonator tool on Wikimedia Labs this week now allows the tool, a primary visualization tool of the Wikidata project, to be used on mobile. R

Brief notes

Signpost Publications by the Years
In his mailing list message, director of analytics Tony Negrin stated: "[we] have identified this gap in our community support and have made resources available to address it." The moves seem well-aligned with the Foundation's recently-evident desire to align more closely with the needs of the editing community, a central theme from this year's State of the WMF report. R


















Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2015-05-13/News_and_notes