Aberdeen Python User Group Mar 2022

Ian Watt - "Python and Wikidata - a match made in heaven?"

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 all data there 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.

Bio: 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.

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A monthly meeting of the Aberdeen Python user community. A talk or two then a practical session of using Python in small teams.

This event is orgnanised by a charity - Code The City. CTC suggests a small donation to help with charity admin costs, but if this is a barrier please just change the ticket price to what you can afford.

We hope to be able to have both a physical and online version of this meet-up. We are waiting to hear from our hosts One Techhub on whether they will be open and what the conditions of attending would be. 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 and it goes ahead you will have to comply with any conditions of attendance (eg masks or social distancing) that the venue operators demand at the time.