Using Observable to explore Wikidata

Show and Tell
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I think that Observable is a great tool to explore Wikidata.

Wikidata is a collaborative knowledge base. It’s a sister project for Wikipedia. Each Wikipedia article is linked to a Wikidata item. For instance, the Wikipedia article about [Florence Nightingale] (Florence - Wikipedia Nightingale) is linked to a Wikidata item. Of course, the big advantage of Wikidata is that data is structured. It can be queried using https://query.wikidata.org/ which uses the SPARQL syntax. Query.wikidata.org is very powerful but limited if you want to draw a visualisation or tell a story with the data.

Of course @mbostock has a nice Hello Wikidata notebook. @lukesmurray has a nice trick to show a query directly in the notebook without any javascript manipulation : Using WikiData Sparql as a "Cell Mode" in Observable / Luke Murray / Observable.

@piecesofuk has a nice notebook exploring UK government : UK Parliament: Cabinet Ministers / piecesofuk / Observable

Since I really believe that Observable is great to explore Wikidata, I’ve written a small introduction for Wikidata users: An introduction to Observable for Wikidata users / PAC / Observable

I also have some examples:

Of course Wikidata and SPARQL are also useful to explore Wikipedia:

I’m sure that there are lots of other great examples and I’d really be interested in creating more bridges between Observable and Wikidata communities.

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SPARQL is not the only way to retrieve data from Wikidata. There is also an API. Here are some functions using Wikidata API: Wikidata API / PAC / Observable

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A new notebook which look at the history of the tour de France using a query from Wikidata : Tour de France's history at a glance / PAC / Observable

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Observable users interested in discovering Wikidata and SPARQL may have a look at the SPARQL wikibook : SPARQL - Wikibooks, open books for an open world and the Wikidata introduction Wikidata:Introduction - Wikidata

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Here is a new notebook Article's wikilinks inspector / PAC / Observable which provides insight about all entities named in a Wikipedia article.

It’s useful to compare articles. For instance, you can see that Sociology in English cites 53 Americans (Article's wikilinks inspector / PAC / Observable) whereas the corresponding article in French cites a majority of French people (Article's wikilinks inspector / PAC / Observable). Both article are about the same topic but the content is different.

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New tool to explore gender diversity in Wikipedia Gender diversity inspector / PAC / Observable. It now filter on birthdate.

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I have collected a dataset including 2,400 SPARQL queries : Hello SPARQL queries dataset / PAC / Observable

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I have some new notebooks:

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The work of the recent Nobel laureate Annie Ernaux in one notebook : Tribute to Annie Ernaux / PAC / Observable

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@pac02 thanks for sharing the examples!

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Tonight’s dataviz shows all Nobel laureates by gender : All Nobel laureates by gender and by year / PAC / Observable.

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@pac02 hi are you presenting these notebooks anywhere or just sharing your learnings?

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I essentially share my notebooks with the Wikidata community, most often in the weekly newsletter Wikidata:Status updates - Wikidata.

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I’ve tried a new visualization : all the works published by Nobel laureates in literature by age in one dataviz : Career of Nobel laureates in literature / PAC / Observable

There is some overlap. So it’s not perfect. Any idea to improve this graph is welcome.

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Yet another example : https://observablehq.com/@johnsamuelwrites/make-Wikidata-also-colorful by @johnsamuelwrites.

@johnsamuelwrites has written nice functions to extract values from the query. I’ll try to reuse them in the future.

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Here is a thread of 24 visualizations for the advent : PAC2: "I'll try to post each day a dataviz related to #W…" - vis.social. It includes visualization of Wikipedia and Wikidata.

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Here is a hashtag which allows to find all notebooks using Wikidata This notebook is a fork