Submissions/Wikipedia and GIS

After careful consideration, the Programme Committee has decided not to accept the below submission at this time. Thank you to the author(s) for participating in the Wikimania 2015 programme submission, we hope to still see you at Wikimania this July.

Submission no.: 3055

Title of the submission: Wikipedia and GIS

Type of submission (discussion, hot seat, panel, presentation, tutorial, workshop): presentation

Author of the submission: Jan Groh

E-mail address: jan.grohwikimedia.cz

Username: Jagro

Country of origin: Czech Republic

Affiliation, if any (organisation, company etc.): Wikimedia Czech Republic

Personal homepage or blog: cs.wp user page

Abstract (at least 300 words to describe your proposal)

Presentation is about using Geographic information systems and mass spatial data processing for work on Wikipedia. Talk is general overview of using GIS software on Wikipedia as a very important tool, it can helps, but because of necessity of special software and knowledge isn't used often.

After the presentation auditors will be able to understand in which cases GIS software can help them on Wikipedia. They will also understand advantages and disadvantages of mass data analyses and know how to form a request to the GIS software user.

First part will discuss how to take existing spatial data from Wikipedia articles/Wikidata and how to process and convert them into structures suitable for next analysis. What is the main difference between data grabbed from Wikipedia and other sources? How can helps compare our data with commercial databases under non-free license? What are the legal aspects?

Second part is about analysis in GIS software and about main problems of it, including missing spatial data and mistakes in them. GIS software can be used for finding mistakes in encyclopedia, analyzing progress done in articles based on spatial referencing or create maps to illustrate articles.

In the third part will be mentioned finishing and exporting GIS data and their usage on Wikipedia. Overview of formats in which you can upload data to Commons will be presented. Problems with exporting maps to map, vector and raster formats and their presenting on Wikipedia. The ideal formats are not supported by Wikimedia Commons so we have to choose format which losts minimum of the information.

In case study will be presented creating map of progress in taking photos of Czech villages during grant program Czech municipality photos. There was used automatic data collecting made by bot. As data were used locations of Czech villages. These data were compared with national database which works on non-free base and according to results, mistakes in georeferencing on Wikipedia were discovered. After comparation with Commons was created a map with villages without photographs. This method was repeated more times to create map of progress in time. Everything in a few minutes – thanks to geographic information systems.

Track

Technology, Interface & Infrastructure

Length of session (if other than 30 minutes, specify how long): 20–30 minutes

Will you attend Wikimania if your submission is not accepted?: yes

Slides or further information (optional): –

Special requests: –

Interested attendees

If you are interested in attending this session, please sign with your username below. This will help reviewers to decide which sessions are of high interest. Sign with a hash and four tildes. (# ~~~~).

Blue Rasberry (talk) 15:36, 19 February 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Yarl (talk) 00:28, 28 February 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Add your username here.