Extract Knowledge from Wikidata to Wikipedia articles related to Coronavirus
In January 30th the World Health Organization (WHO) has declared Corona virus disease (COVID-19) as epidemic affecting 184 countries as Pandemic. It was the same date that the first confirmed case was reported in Thrissur, a place in Kerala, India which is my hometown. It was then in the beginning of the March new higher number of cases came to light in different parts of the county.
People in the country started searching for information related to the disease and several volunteers in Wikipedia started focusing towards to the articles related to Corona virus to provide clear, neutral, and reliable information around the globe.
A project, WikiProject India started in Wikidata in the year 2017 to create and improve Wikidata’s coverage of topics related to India, its history, geography, culture, society, people, science, technology, arts, entertainment and even more related to India understands the needs of the open data related to 2020 coronavirus pandemic in India. A on-wiki COVID-19 task force page was created in Wikidata under WikiProject India to create and enrich up-to-date database and to co-ordinate the activities as the disease is spreading rapidly in different states of India.Several volunteers from different language communities and from different states and regions also joined this initiative to make the project live and up-to-date.
Right now the task force provides the data sourced daily from the official bulletins published by governments of India and weekly report of WHO. It also provides the state and district wise corona virus updates in India. Sparql queries are available in the visualization page to visualize the data added to Wikidata realted to India.
The Translation task force under WikiProject COVID-19 in Wikipedia also helped so many volunteers to create a shorter / longer version of Wikipedia articles in various Indic languages. Wikipedia article related to Corona virus disease has been translated to different Wikipedia languages by different community volunteers. The English article 2020 coronavirus pandemic in India is available in 30 other languages currently. And nearly 20 articles of coronavirus pandemic are available in different languages.
So there comes the role of Wikidata items of the corresponding Wikipedia article that we are updating under the task force. Wikidata is a free multilingual database that collects structured data to provide support for Wikipedia. So we started adding the Wikidata values to the Infobox of the articles that are available in different languages. Any changes that has been made in Wikidata will reflect in all the Wikipedia articles that are added with the template code. This helps to save time for updating each articles which may have connected with different language Wikipedia. Till date 32 items of states that are affected by COVID-19 is updated by the task force members as well as by other contributors. Currently 15 articles related COVID-19 in India in English Wikipedia uses values from Wikidata.
A dashboard was also created to visualize the data that are added to Wikidata related to coronavirus in India and it’s States / Union Territories. The data comes from live Wikidata query. The page is published under in CC0 license.
If you are interested in this project do join and contribute to Wikidata. That’s all about the project that is currently going on Wikidata. If you have any feedback, comments and suggestions about the dashboard let me know.
