New researches

Wednesday, March 22, 2023

Colorado Air Quality, Google Bard, DPReview, More: Wednesday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, March 22, 2023

Colorado Air Quality, Google Bard, DPReview, More: Wednesday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, March 22, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

Colorado Department of Public Health & Environment: State health department increases transparency with new, interactive air quality records map. “The state health department’s Air Pollution Control Division has launched a new, interactive online map to search for air quality records. The map provides access to thousands of digital air quality records for stationary sources of air pollution.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

The Verge: Google’s Bard chatbot doesn’t love me — but it’s still pretty weird. “As far as I can tell, it’s also a noticeably worse tool than Bing, at least when it comes to surfacing useful information from around the internet. Bard is wrong a lot. And when it’s right, it’s often in the dullest way possible. Bard wrote me a heck of a Taylor Swift-style breakup song about dumping my cat, but it’s not much of a productivity tool. And it’s definitely not a search engine.”

Ars Technica: Amazon layoffs will shut down camera review site DPReview.com after 25 years. “Amazon has plans to lay off at least 27,000 workers this year, including 9,000 that were announced in an internal email Monday morning. One unexpected casualty: Digital Photography Review, also known as DPReview, is losing its entire editorial staff, and the site will stop publishing on April 10.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

GamesRadar: YouTuber’s wild $20k quest to preserve the Nintendo eShop could be the only legal way to save game history, and that sucks. “Over the past year, YouTuber Jirard ‘The Completionist’ Khalil spent $22,791 and uncountable hours purchasing and downloading every single game on the Wii U and 3DS eShop ahead of the shutdown of those two services later this month. This is an absurd quest that no one should ever undertake. But according to video game historians, it could also be the only legal path to preserving any of these games in the years to come.”

Coconuts Bangkok: Thai politicos urged to prioritize digital rights in run-up to election. “Thailand’s next general election date is now set, and digital rights advocates have called on its political parties to prioritize digital rights and freedom of expression. EngageMedia, a nonprofit promoting digital rights in Southeast Asia, has released a four-point agenda that identifies policies to protect digital rights and ensure access to information.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

Motherboard: On-the-Run Hacker Who Allegedly Breached Federal Cop Database Arrested in Florida. “Nicholas Ceraolo, who faces years in prison for allegedly accessing a U.S. federal law enforcement database and other crimes, was still at large when authorities announced the charges against him.”

ProPublica: Nepal Wants a Sacred Necklace Returned. But a Major Museum Still Keeps It on Display.. “Questions about the origins and ownership of some Asian artifacts in a key collection at the Art Institute of Chicago have cast doubt on the museum’s commitment to keeping its galleries free of stolen antiquities.”

Rolling Stone: Intel Bulletins Warn of Surge in Violent Threats Over Trump Arrest. “THE U.S. CAPITOL Police and other law enforcement agencies are reporting a surge in online threats of violence in the run-up to a possible arrest of Donald Trump, according to three government intelligence bulletins obtained by Rolling Stone and interviews with senior officials.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

National Library of Medicine: Data Science Tools Will Speed Rare Disease Solutions. “Data-driven innovations are unlocking answers about rare diseases—as well as more common diseases—faster than ever before, and that’s why data science is so important to NCATS’ vision of more treatments for all people more quickly. One of our key strategies is to leverage or connect existing data in new and meaningful ways. This year’s Rare Disease Day at NIH event highlighted several ways NCATS is applying this approach to help address the public health challenge of rare diseases.”

University of Oxford: Viewing self-harm images on the internet and in social media usually causes harm, according to new review. “The evidence, reviewed by researchers from Oxford University’s Department of Psychiatry and Oxford Health NHS Foundation Trust, indicates that viewing such images usually causes harm, though the findings also highlighted the complexity of the issue.” Good afternoon, Internet…

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March 23, 2023 at 12:10AM
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Homeowners Insurance, Minnesota State Patrol, Misinformation and Trust in Science, More: Wednesday ResearchBuzz, March 22, 2023

Homeowners Insurance, Minnesota State Patrol, Misinformation and Trust in Science, More: Wednesday ResearchBuzz, March 22, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

SEARCH GIZMO OF THE DAY: Politician Parade

Politician Parade adds a state’s Congresspeople to your Google News search. Depending on how many reps your state has, this tool will generate one or more URLs with your query AND your Congressional representatives added as an ‘or’ array. (Requires free ProPublica API key.)

NEW RESOURCES

Rutgers University: New Online Tool Helps Consumers Compare Homeowners Insurance. “[RU InsureScore] is a unique tool that gives consumers information about coverage that insurance companies don’t, and it compares and rates policies of major national insurers.”

Minnesota Department of Public Safety: Minnesota State Patrol Launches New Online Accountability Dashboard. “A new Minnesota State Patrol online dashboard launched by the agency will increase transparency, promote accountability and build trust by giving the public easier access to data, policies and other information. The new dashboard gives an inside look at the work troopers and State Patrol staff do on a regular basis. It includes information about each division and specialty unit, how they serve the public and the corresponding data related to the work they do.”

EVENTS

National Academies: Registration Now Open — May 24-26 Nobel Prize Summit on Misinformation and Trust in Science. “Registration is now open for the Nobel Prize Summit Truth, Trust and Hope — which will convene Nobel Prize laureates and other world-renowned experts and leaders for a global conversation on how to stop misinformation from eroding public trust in science, scientists, and the institutions they serve. Hosted by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and the Nobel Foundation, the summit will be held May 24-26 in Washington, D.C., and virtually, and is free and open to the public.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Digital Library of Georgia: Georgia Historic Newspapers Update Winter 2023. “This winter, the Digital Library of Georgia released several new grant-funded newspaper titles to the Georgia Historic Newspapers website. Included below is a list of the newly available titles.”

Visual Studio Magazine: AI-Powered ‘Data Wrangler’ VS Code Tool Eases Prep Work for Data Scientists. “The Data Wrangler extension works with the favorite programming language of data scientists, Python, and the associated open source Pandas library to enhance the data preparation process: exploring, manipulating/cleansing and visualizing data.”

Engadget: TikTok is revamping its community guidelines ahead of a potential US ban. “As TikTok gears up for its latest fight to not get banned in the United States, the company is again trying to increase transparency around how it operates. TikTok revealed an updated set of community guidelines, the sweeping set of rules that dictates what creators are allowed to post on its platform.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

New Arab: Out of sight: Iraq’s TV archive lost to the war. “When US forces invaded Iraq, looting and pillaging of political and cultural artefacts was rampant. Two decades later, Iraq’s TV archive remains lost despite efforts to retrieve the country’s stolen collections.”

Gizmodo: ChatGPT Bug Let People See Other Users’ Chat History Titles. “On Monday, a few ChatGPT threads on Reddit and Twitter showed how a sidebar that usually displays user history was showing the history titles of other users as well. It’s unclear why the Reddit user was seeing a few Chinese-language titles as well as histories related to Chinese ideologies. Jordan Wheeler, a cybersecurity consultant, shared a much more broad selection of prompts in a Monday Twitter post.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

ABA Journal: Lawyers kicked off Twitter sue for breach of contract, citing Musk’s amnesty tweet. “The lawyers sued through their company, Don’t Tread On Us, in a January lawsuit that was removed to federal court in Miami on March 9. They claim they are eligible for reinstatement because of a Nov. 24, 2022, tweet by new Twitter owner Elon Musk in which he offered ‘a general amnesty to suspended accounts, provided that they have not broken the law or engaged in egregious spam.'”

Reuters: Google denies destroying ‘chat’ evidence in U.S. antitrust lawsuit . “Alphabet Inc’s Google has denied intentionally destroying evidence in the U.S. Justice Department’s antitrust lawsuit over the company’s search business, in a response to the government’s bid for sanctions in federal court.”

Bloomberg: Google Suspends Pinduoduo After Finding Malware in Versions. “Google has suspended PDD Holdings Inc.’s main Chinese shopping app Pinduoduo after discovering malware in unsanctioned versions of the software, dealing a blow to one of the country’s biggest online retailers.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

New York Times: Love letters, cries of despair and shoe orders, centuries late. “The project, expected to last two decades, aims to make the collection of more than 160,000 letters and hundreds of thousands of other documents, written in at least 19 languages, freely available and easily searchable online.”

OTHER THINGS I THINK ARE COOL

NDTV: “Fascinating Archive”: Man Shares How His Grandmother Kept Record Of Every Book She Read. “A man recently shared how his grandmother kept a written record of every book she ever read since she was 14 years old. Taking to Twitter, user Ben Myers, who according to his bio is a professor at Alphacrucis University College, shared a picture of the list of books his grandmother printed on a typewriter.” Good morning, Internet…

March 22, 2023 at 05:32PM
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Tuesday, March 21, 2023

Junkipedia, Lloyd Mackey, Deepfake Videos, More: Tuesday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, March 21, 2023

Junkipedia, Lloyd Mackey, Deepfake Videos, More: Tuesday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, March 21, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

Global Investigative Journalism Network: New Investigative Tools for Monitoring Social Media Platforms. “Originally designed to monitor disinformation and ‘junk news,’ Junkipedia has developed to the point where the tool will change its name this year, to reflect its new global, all-purpose digging role. Junkipedia was designed by, and for, investigative journalists and researchers — and it’s free.”

Trinity Western University: TWU celebrates the legacy of BC Christian media pioneer Lloyd Mackey with new online archival collection. “Journalist, author, and educator Dr. Lloyd Mackey has close to half a century of experience in community, faith-based and leadership journalism, including 15 years working out of the Canadian Parliamentary Press Gallery in Ottawa. In honour of Dr. Mackey’s lifetime of service to Canada and to Canadian Christian communities, Trinity Western University is pleased to unveil a new digital collection of his works in the TWU Archives, the Lloyd Mackey fonds.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

The Daily Beast: People are Already Making Deepfake Videos of Trump’s Arrest. “Newswatchers don’t have to wait for real images of Donald Trump in handcuffs—deepfakes are already flooding social media thanks to artificial intelligence technology that lets any hoaxer pose as a breaking news photographer.”

USEFUL STUFF

Social Media Examiner: How to Repurpose Video for Maximum Social Media Impact. “Looking for ways to save time and still maintain a strong social media presence? Wondering how to make video content repurposing part of your strategy? In this article, you’ll discover 10 ways to repurpose your videos for top social media platforms.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

CNN: Google was beloved as an employer for years. Then it laid off thousands by email. “Google (GOOGL), which for years ranked as the top company to work for in the United States, laid off thousands of workers by e-mail. And not just any employees: Decades-long veterans of the company, at least one employee on health leave, and even an employee in labor with her second child were all cut, with little explanation.”

Press Information Bureau (India): Nehru Memorial Museum and Library (NMML) has launched an ambitious project to digitize the research material in its possession. “Nehru Memorial Museum and Library (NMML) has launched an ambitious project to digitize the research material in its possession. Under this project, the goal is to ensure the conversion of the entire India House Collection of the Library consisting of 40,000 books, reports, periodicals (containing around 70,00,000 pages), 55,00,000 pages of archival documents, and of 30,000 microfilms and 57,000 microfiches (consisting of approximately 2.5 crore images) to digital form.” If you’re not from India and confused by the commas in the numbers, this will enlighten you.

SECURITY & LEGAL

Techdirt: Italy Decides That Leonardo da Vinci’s 500 Year Old Works Are Not In The Public Domain. “The Communia blog has another example of something that is unequivocally in the public domain and yet cannot be used for any purpose, in this case a commercial one. The public domain art is the famous Vitruvian Man drawn by Leonardo da Vinci over 500 years ago.”

Media Matters: Elon Musk has boosted a QAnon influencer at least two dozen times since he took over Twitter and reinstated the account . “CEO Elon Musk has repeatedly boosted a QAnon influencer on Twitter, doing so at least two dozen times since he took over the platform and reinstated the influencer’s account, a Media Matters analysis has found.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Ars Technica: HDDs aren’t as durable as they used to be, study of 2,007 damaged drives suggests. “An analysis of 2,007 damaged or defective hard disk drives (HDDs) has led a data recovery firm to conclude that ‘in general, old drives seem more durable and resilient than new drives.'”

Michigan Daily: A case for keeping your relationship off of social media. “I certainly don’t love the idea of any of my followers gossiping about what I’m posting, and I’m sure you don’t either. Yet, isn’t that inevitable? By putting even just small pieces of our lives on social media, don’t we invite people to speculate about it all, including our relationships?” Good afternoon, Internet…

March 22, 2023 at 12:46AM
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Silhouette Portraits, Glaze, Twitter, More: Tuesday ResearchBuzz, March 21, 2023

Silhouette Portraits, Glaze, Twitter, More: Tuesday ResearchBuzz, March 21, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

Smithsonian: Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery Reveals Identities of Hundreds of People in Early 19th-Century Portrait Album. “The Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery has announced the launch of William Bache’s Silhouettes Album, a microsite featuring new research and digitized images for 1,800 cut-paper silhouettes by Anglo-American artist William Bache. In addition to presenting portraits of famous figures like Thomas Jefferson and Martha Washington, the digital project restores the identity of previously unknown individuals rarely encountered in Federal-era portraiture—from traveling entertainers to tavern keepers and dance instructors.”

TechCrunch: Glaze protects art from prying AIs. “A research paper published by the team explains the (beta) app works by adding almost imperceptible ‘perturbations’ to each artwork it’s applied to — changes that are designed to interfere with AI models’ ability to read data on artistic style — and make it harder for generative AI technology to mimic the style of the artwork and its artist. Instead systems are tricked into outputting other public styles far removed from the original artwork.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

PC Magazine: Good Luck Tagging Your Specific Location on Twitter Anymore. “Twitter’s sense of place is getting fuzzier: At the end of last week, the service appears to have dropped a location-tagging feature it added in 2015, leaving users unable to mark a tweet at a spot more precise than a neighborhood.” Happy to report that Pam’s Pin still works.

How-To Geek: Bing Chat AI Is Getting Faster, and Has New Buttons. “Microsoft introduced the Bing Chat AI chatbot in February, which has quickly risen in popularity. A few new features are now rolling out, including faster performance, new sharing options, and reduced limits.”

Bleeping Computer: File-sharing site Zippyshare shutting down after 17 years. “File-sharing site Zippyshare has announced they are shutting down the site by the end of March 2023 after announcing they can no longer afford to keep the service running.”

USEFUL STUFF

Search Engine Journal: How Does Mastodon Work And How Do You Get Started?. “Mastodon is a decentralized and self-hosted social platform and a popular alternative to Twitter. Learn how it works and how to get started.”

Smashing Magazine: Free Fonts For Interface Designers.”In this post, we compiled some free fonts that we came across and that you probably haven’t spotted before. Some of them shine with their flexibility, some put a special focus on readability, and others are a great choice if you want to make a bold statement. As different as the fonts are, they all have one thing in common: You can use them for free in both personal and commercial projects.”

Hongkiat: 10 YouTube Chrome Extensions for Better Watching Experience. “In this article, I will introduce the great 10 Chrome extensions for YouTube that increase your productivity. All the extensions introduced in this article are free to use!”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

The Pantagraph: Illinois law, 200 years ago: Inside the quest to digitize state’s legal history. “A committee charged with preserving historic Illinois Supreme Court documents has received a $135,000 grant from the National Archives to digitize court records dating from the state’s infancy through the end of the Civil War.”

Deadline: Twitter Responds To All Email Inquiries From The Press With A Poop Emoji, 51-Year-Old Owner Elon Musk Reports. “All inquiries from members of the press directed to Twitter’s official press email now receive the same automatic reply: a poop emoji. Elon Musk, who bought the social media company for $44 billion last year, relayed the update on his own Twitter feed over the weekend.” This is such a stupid waste of pixels I’m ashamed to be typing it. But I want evidence somewhere so that 40 years down the road nobody dismisses this story as apocryphal.

SECURITY & LEGAL

WIRED: Online Sleuths Untangle the Mystery of the Nord Stream Sabotage. ” Open source intelligence (OSINT) researchers are using public sources of data in their efforts to verify or debunk the snippets of information published about the Nord Stream explosions. They’re providing a glimpse of clarity to an incident that’s shrouded by secrecy and international politics.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

Washington Post: Antisemitic tweets soared on Twitter after Musk took over, study finds. “The study, which used machine-learning tools to identify likely antisemitic tweets, found that the average weekly number of such posts ‘more than doubled after Musk’s acquisition’ — a trend that has held in the months after Musk took over.” Good morning, Internet…

March 21, 2023 at 05:30PM
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Monday, March 20, 2023

Minority-Serving Institutions, Mastodon, Twitter, More: Monday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, March 20, 2023

Minority-Serving Institutions, Mastodon, Twitter, More: Monday Afternoon ResearchBuzz, March 20, 2023
By ResearchBuzz

NEW RESOURCES

New York University: Researchers launch database with new classification system for minority-serving institutions in US. “The MSI Data Project, launched in March 2023, offers dashboards with data on MSI eligibility, funding status, institutional characteristics, enrollment, and graduation metrics for MSIs from 2017-2021. MSIs are postsecondary colleges and universities that offer resources and support for racial and ethnic minorities or that have a particular percentage of racial and ethnic minorities enrolled.”

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

IT World Canada: Mastodon passes the 10 million account milestone. “Mastodon is owned by a German not-for-profit. It cannot be sold, and even if there were some way around this, the protocols that support the federation of servers are open source. In fact, Meta’s rumoured new Twitter replacement will use the same open-source protocols called ActivityPub that supports Mastodon.”

Mashable: Twitter turns off SMS 2FA today if you don’t pay. Here’s why you should act now.. “If you have Twitter’s SMS-based two-factor authentication (2FA) method turned on, but you haven’t paid for Twitter Blue, you’ve probably been getting nagging messages from Twitter about it going away. Well, today is the last day to switch to a different 2FA, and it would be wise to do so.”

USEFUL STUFF

Larry Ferlazzo: This Week’s Free & Useful Artificial Intelligence Tools For The Classroom. “At least, for now, I’m going to make this a weekly feature which will highlight additions to THE BEST NEW – & FREE – ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE TOOLS THAT COULD BE USED IN THE CLASSROOM.”

AROUND THE INTERNET WORLD

Motherboard: Great, Dating Apps Are Getting More Hellish Thanks to AI Chatbots. “A group claiming to be disenfranchised ex-Tinder employees gone rogue has built an app that uses AI chatbots to talk to women for men on dating apps, in an effort to combat the ‘disadvantages the average man’ faces in online dating.”

SECURITY & LEGAL

International Consortium of Investigative Journalists: More than 1000 artifacts in Metropolitan Museum of Art catalog linked to alleged looting and trafficking figures. “In the antiquities trade, the Met’s reputation has begun to erode. Over the last two years, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and its media partners have reported on the Met’s acquisition practices — often in relation to a trove of items obtained from Cambodia in an era when that country’s cultural heritage was sold off wholesale to the highest bidder.”

Unseen Japan: Scam Website Steals Japanese Cosplayer’s Labor of Love. “A Japanese cosplayer was recently horrified to find that their homemade cosplay of a much-loved character — an outfit still sitting in their own home — was listed for sale on an online outlet under their own photo and some of their own words.”

Associated Press: Here’s how an AI tool may flag parents with disabilities. “The Hackneys, who have developmental disabilities, are struggling to understand how taking their daughter to the hospital when she refused to eat could be seen as so neglectful that she’d need to be taken from her home. They wonder if an artificial intelligence tool that the Allegheny County Department of Human Services uses to predict which children could be at risk of harm singled them out because of their disabilities.”

RESEARCH & OPINION

The Conversation: Algorithms are moulding and shaping our politics. Here’s how to avoid being gamed . “In a recent paper, I coined the term ‘algopopulism’: algorithmically aided politics. The political content in our personal feeds not only represents the world and politics to us. It creates new, sometimes “alternative”, realities. It changes how we encounter and understand politics and even how we understand reality itself.”

MIT News: Where the sidewalk ends. “Most cities don’t map their own pedestrian networks. Now, researchers have built the first open-source tool to let planners do just that.” Good afternoon, Internet…

March 21, 2023 at 12:11AM
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Turn Wikipedia into an RSS Search Engine With WikiRSS

Turn Wikipedia into an RSS Search Engine With WikiRSS
By ResearchBuzz

RSS is still the most underrated tech on the Internet. I am constantly amazed about all the lip-curling and “dead technology” derision toward something without which I could literally not do my self-appointed job. RSS is an unbeatable way to monitor information from specific Web sources and even by keyword.

Actually, I think that’s why some parties sneer at it. After all, to use RSS is to curate your own experience of the Internet via a myriad of blogs and websites. The only limit is your own preferences and knowledge – no algorithmic gatekeeper stands in your way. You can consume RSS feeds via any number of feed readers and managers; you’re not tied to a single platform with the constant threat of either subscription fees or unrelenting marketing hanging over your head. And identity verification is as simple as checking the domain name of where the feed comes from.

Great for users. Not-so-great for social media companies who would prefer to corral us on one site and then beat us over the head with targeted advertising.

Lately, as Twitter continues to deconstruct into some kind of Il Paese dei Balocchi fever dream, I’ve noticed more interest in RSS feeds. And yesterday I noticed that Wikidata has a property for RSS feeds (P1019). So I thought: why don’t I knock together a Wikipedia-based RSS search engine?

And now there is WikiRSS ( https://searchgizmos.com/wikirss/ ) .

Using WikiRSS

WikiRSS searches the name and description of Wikipedia pages with RSS feeds and returns a list of pages matching your query along with their feeds. A page name and description isn’t a lot of text – maybe a tweet’s worth? – so make sure your searches are single-keyword and general. Instead of cows, search for agriculture. Instead of astronauts, search for space. Here’s what a search for plants looks like:

And here’s Ubuntu:

WikiRSS isn’t going to bury you in feeds – I don’t get the impression lots of Wikipedia pages have feeds associated with them – but I think there’s enough to warrant exploring.

March 20, 2023 at 10:59PM
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Sheet-Shaped Wikipedia: Turn Wikidata Into Spreadsheet-Ready Text Files

Sheet-Shaped Wikipedia: Turn Wikidata Into Spreadsheet-Ready Text Files
By ResearchBuzz

Wikipedia can be invaluable for searching, but sometimes it’s hard to extract Wikipedia’s Wikidata in a way that makes it immediately-useful for ongoing research. If you wanted to get all the official Web sites in a category, for example, you might go trawling around in the Wikidata Web site, or you might use Wikidata Quick Dip and generate a list that way. But you’d still have to do a lot of copying and pasting.

So I made Sheet-Shaped Wikipedia, at https://searchgizmos.com/ssw/ . SSW lets you provide a list of categories and get a carat-delimited text file (or files) of all the pages in those categories which share a Wikidata property. It’s very easy to use. Let’s step through it.

How to Use Sheet-Shaped Wikipedia

First, enter a list of Wikipedia categories from which you want to extract Wikidata properties. You can paste the entire URL as you can see in the screenshot, or you can use the name of the category without the Category: string ( RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars contestants ) or with (Category:People with narcolepsy). Sometimes special characters will break an URL and SSW won’t give you any results. If that happens, try again with just the category name.

After you’ve entered the categories you want to review, use the drop-down menu to choose a Wikidata property you want to search for. I couldn’t list all the properties as there are over 10,000 of them, so this focuses mostly on social media. Wikidata properties to search for include official website, Facebook ID, Twitter ID, LinkedIn Personal/Company ID, YouTube Video/Channel ID, GitHub ID, and Google+ ID. (I left the last one in as a joke.)

Finally, you can choose to get the output as one text file per category, or you can merge them into a single file.

Let’s say we wanted to find official Web sites for the pages in these categories and we want all the results in one file:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Class_I_railroads_in_North_America

Category:Ohio railroads

Companies in the Dow Jones Transportation Average

Here’s what SSW looks like for that search:

All I have to do after I’ve made my choices is click Process Categories.

A spinning circle will appear to indicate Things Are Happening and a few seconds after that I’ll get a clickable link to a carat(^)-delimited text file.

Click on that and it’ll download to your computer.

Opening a Sheet-Shaped Wikipedia Text File

Here’s how to import the SSW-generated text file in Google Sheets. First, open a new Google Sheet and choose File -> Import.

Google Sheets will ask for the imported data. Upload your just-downloaded merged_data.txt file. .

You’ll get an Import file box. You have several Import Location options but I recommend Replace current sheet (the empty one you opened) because it’s simplest. For Separator Type choose Custom, and for Custom separator choose ^ , which is Shift-6 on the keyboards I’m familiar with. (Don’t rely on Google to try to detect the separator automatically.) There’s also a box for automatically converting text to numbers. Make sure that’s unchecked.

When you’ve made your choices click Import data and bam! Instant spreadsheet. (There’s a column B which has a link back to the original Wikipedia article, but I’ve hidden it to make the screenshot easier to understand.)

It’s important to note that not every page may have an official web site property associated with it. It all depends on what information has been provided to Wikidata. (On the other hand, the example query did yield a text sheet with 47 items. )

Sometimes the property Wikidata provides isn’t complete in itself. For example, if you get LinkedIn company IDs, you might get a string like via-rail-canada . You can use Google Sheets’ CONCATENATE function and a LinkedIn stem to turn that into a whole URL : https://www.linkedin.com/company/via-rail-canada/ .

I didn’t do a lot of deep thinking about the Wikidata properties to include in the dropdown menu, so if you have other items you’d like to see there, let me know. I don’t want it to end up at 100 properties, though!

March 20, 2023 at 06:35PM
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