Adding manual edits to Wikidata: how to add statements with verifiable data and how to create items

Wikidata is a free linked database of secondary data (facts and statements) that can be read and edited by both humans and machines. Wikidata acts as central storage for the structured data of its Wikimedia sister projects including Wikipedia, Wikivoyage, Wikisource, and others.

This session was a practical workshop at Repository Fringe 2017 demonstrating how to add statements to Wikidata manually as follows:

What are we doing?

Adding some missing data to Wikidata items for ‘Fellows of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.’ Each Wikidata editor will receive a batch with 5 fellows.

What data to add?

Our practical session will focus on adding the field: award received (P166)
●Open your selected batch of data from the batches spreadsheet

Finding the item

2. Search for a Q number on your list and click on the result

Adding the ‘award received’ statement

1. Click “+ statement” button above the identifiers section.

2. Type “award received” and select it.

3. Type “Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh” and Select.

4. If appropriate add a qualifier underneath.

5. Click ‘add qualifier’ and type ‘point of time’

6. Add year of election in the value field (provided in the batch spreadsheet).

7. Click Save

Extension exercise – adding reference information.

To add a reference:

Click on a statement and select ‘Add reference’.
Type ‘Reference URL’ as the property for the reference and paste in the RSE url address of the reference (provided in batch spreadsheet) in the value field. Hit return to save the reference.

Further data you can add:

Add the statement member (P463) of Royal Society of Edinburgh (Q117467) if it is not there.

· Add Date of birth (P569) data as a statement if date of birth information is available. This will help visualise the information in timeline form.

· Add Place of birth (P19) data as a statement if place of birth information is available. This will help visualise the information in map form.

Part 2: Create missing items and add basic statements.

2. Use the person’s name (provided in the Batch spreadsheet) as the English label for this new data item.

3. Click ‘create’ at the bottom of the page.

4. Add 3 statements to this new data item by clicking on the ‘+ Add statement’ button.

i) ‘Instance of’(P31) with a value of ‘human’ (Q5)

ii) ‘Gender’ (P21) with a value of ‘female’ (Q6581072)

iii) ‘award received’ (P166) with a value of ‘Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh’ (Q5438598).

Hit return to save each time.

Congratulations you are now a Wikidata editor!