Learning patterns/Data of Wikipedia and Wikidata in your Google spreadsheet

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Data of Wikipedia and Wikidata in your Google spreadsheet

problemNot many in the Wikimedia community are well aware of running queries or even using tools to acquire different kinds of data-points.

solutionA simple browser-based add-on works perfectly for some of the commonly used queries. And you can see the output in the Google Spreadsheet by running simple queries in the spreadsheet cell itself.

creator• SPanigrahi (WMF)

created on13 May, 2016

What problem does this solve?

If you are a geek already, imagine of yourself as a Wikimedian who is yet become like you in using Quarry or API Sandbox or even Tool Labs. If you are not a geek, then you would be knowing the pain in finding some of the commonly used data points from Wikipedia and Wikidata. You must have thought many a times about simple data points like having list of all the Wikipedia article on the same topic or even categories, page views of an article and geo coordinates of a place, etc.

What is the solution?

The way it works is really simple.

Steps to use this

Screencast-based tutorial to use the Google Spreadsheet Chrome add-on WikipediaTool

1. Open your browser, go to bitly.com/wikipediatool. Find the link to the Google Chrome add-on in the installation section.
2. Or you can straightaway visit the add-on page on Google Chrome. Click on FREE.
3. The tool will install and will open a new Google Spreadsheet in a new tab. When it asks for permission allow for the same.
4. In order to try the tool, type =WIKITRANSLATE. You will see a small description below your typed text. Click on that so that the documentation text is open on your right. Now continue with your typed text by adding it fully =WIKITRANSLATE("en:Orange"). Press Enter.
5. It will load and show you a long list of names in different languages. What it did is, it tried to search on Wikidata for all the articles on w:Orange and has listed down them in the Google Spreadsheet.
6. Check the documentation (mentioned above) for more information about all the other queries.

If you find issues with using it and want to report any error, please let the developer know.

Things to consider

• You would need a Google/GMail account to use this.

Limitations

This add-on currently works only on Chrome and on Google Spreadsheet. Even though the source code is open source for the add-on, it is not the same for the latter two products. But you are really passionate about liberate this open in all sides, and you think it is worth doing so, you can check the Apache-licensed source code and find a way to do so.

See also

• Meta-wiki resource page for the tool