Lightning talk on the PopulationFromWikidata module for place articles: transcript

Key points

• About 15,000 Australian place articles exist on English Wikipedia, and about 12,300 have infobox population values that had to be updated by hand.
• Because the articles are linked to Wikidata items that already hold population statements, the module can fetch values and references for the infobox template.
• The module picks a value using three criteria: good reference information, a geographic area matching the article, and the most recent date.
• The module is only called if the population value is manually removed from the infobox, so existing work is not overridden.
• After a year it is used successfully in over 3,000 articles, with documentation and a blog post available.
• She hopes Wikifunctions could let similar modules work in other languages and countries.

Chapters

1. 0:00Introduction and the Wikidata fellowship
2. 1:21The challenge of manual population updates
3. 2:09Using Wikidata population data in the infobox
4. 2:56Criteria for choosing the best population value
5. 3:31How the module is called from the template
6. 4:03Results after a year and future uses

Full transcript

0:00Without much ado, I would like to invite the next speaker to the podium. Let's listen to the video. Hi. Okay, let me share my screen. Hi, everybody. I'm sorry that I couldn't be there in person.

0:31My name is Maya, and I'm going to tell you about a newer module called Population from Wikidata that I worked on last year. um so i worked on this as a part of a wikidata fellowship through wikimedia australia and i'm very new to contributing to wikimedia projects so luckily i had a massive very talented mentor team and shout out to sam and alex who are at wikinania so go and talk to them if you want to hear more about this project um then we wrote a really good blog post to summarize this whole project from start to finish and of course all the documentation is with the module so go and check that out and I'll put this presentation on Commons as well for you to grab those links.

1:21So, what was the challenge? Our challenge is that there are about 15,000 Australian case articles in English Wikipedia, and about 12,300 of those have population values in the info box. so the status as at last year was that all these population values for all these articles needed to be manually updated whenever there was new census data say or population data released that could be used so you can imagine that this is a huge amount of manual work and prone to to error through such copying and pasting so we figured that we could make use of Wikidata to semi-automate this process.

2:09This is possible because all the Australian Place articles are linked to their equivalent Wikidata items and a couple of users have done a huge amount of work of adding population values and statements to these items and developing bulk upload methods so that there is a huge amount of really good population data in these Place items. so what we needed to do was to write a newer module that would grab these population values and the reference data and give it to the info box Australian Place template So most of the work that I was involved in was designing how are we going to choose which population value is the best one for any given article.

2:56So what we decided was some criteria that had to be met. Mainly we needed to have good reference information so that we could reference the value we were using. We needed to also check that the population value we were selecting had a geographic area that matched what was being described. described in the Wikipedia article because, for example, you don't want to use a suburb population value if you describe a city. And of course we wanted to get the most recent value of all the possible population values we have in the item.

3:31The module then crunches around these criteria against these rules and gives as an output the population value and the reference data that goes with it back to the Infobox template. So the way we've set it up is that the module is only called from the template if you manually remove the pop value. This would so we didn't want to automatically override everybody's work and potentially cause a whole lot of mistakes and problems.

4:03So at the moment, you have to go through and do this manually, but of course, this is just a one-time thing because after that, it will always draw the population value from wikidata and you can always bulk upload. One minute, let's. So it is a much more efficient and less error-prone method than the manual updating per each article. so it's been live for a year now there's over 3 000 articles successfully using this module we are keeping track of some of you know how how many articles and what changes are happening so we're going to check out the graphs and the tables and things that are happening of course there's a whole lot of documentation and here are a couple of links to the module and to that blog post and go and talk to Sam and Alex if you want to ask any more questions. I love hearing about Wikifunctions project because maybe this sort of module could then be used in other

5:06contexts, in other Wikipedias, in other languages, in other countries, which would be great. Thanks, everybody thank you very much that was an amazing

Source and licence

Recording: File:Wikimania 2023 - Plenary - 18 August - Lightning Talk - PopulationFromWikidata' module for place articles.webm by Wikimania 2023 (2023-08-18), via Wikimedia Commons. Licence: CC BY-SA 4.0. The transcript, summary and chapters on this page are shared under the same licence (CC BY-SA 4.0).

The transcript is machine speech-to-text by the TidyTools Audio & video transcriber; the summary, key points and chapters were written by Claude from that transcript. Both may contain errors: check the recording before quoting it.