User:Yurik/Facebooking Wikidata

“Facebooking” Wikidata: how to go from WikiData to WikiKnowledge

Wikidata is similar to a library archive - the useful data stays buried until someone does a lengthy research, puts all the facts together, and makes an eye catching summary, like the Panama papers graph by Finn Årup Nielsen. In other words, it almost always requires the advanced research, programming and SPARQL skills.

There are many tools to visually explore Wikidata data for nonprofessionals. For example, the ICIJ database starts with an entity, like a person or a business, and shows the links to other connected entities, each of which could also be expanded to show further links. Yet this method does not scale well when one entity has more than a few connections, as it creates an unreadable cloud.

Timeline View

There is another visualization method, one that has been heavily used by the social networks. After all, a social network is a graph database, with interconnected people, organizations, and events. A timeline.

A Facebook personal account page has two distinct views: the general person information page, and the list of events as they happened to that person in time. Currently, Wikidata entries are shown in the info mode, but could also be visualized as timed events. For example, a politician entry could be shown as a timeline of events like elections, vote history, scandals, and achievements, each having some time reference.

Converting Data to a Timeline

There are three types of timed items an entity could have:

time value property, like the date of birth (P569)
a reference to another entity with a time qualifier, like the significant event property (P793)
a back-reference from another entity to this one, where the other entity either has a time qualifier, or some event time value

All three types can be shown as "an infinite scrollable timeline", a vertical card view that represents everything related to the given entity in a (reverse) chronological order. Each card would represent one related event. The view could offer a way to change the granularity of the data, filter out certain types of cards, and allow readers to drill down into the cards. Moreover, the views for some well-known types of entities like "politician" could be preconfigured by the community to make it easier to read.

Having timeline view of the data would significantly improve the level of readability and usefulness of each Wikidata page, especially when this page is generated as a stub article. It might also be a better way to proofread and edit existing data.