Dataharvest EIJC 2022

Wikipedia is an incredible source of information, but much of the
details it stores are unstructured and difficult to retrieve. Its
lesser known sister project, Wikidata, has however many of the features
that data and investigative journalists love: a huge treasure trove of
connected data with nicely deduplicated unique identifiers, unecumbered
by licensing restrictions. Even if often not as complete as we wish it
was, Wikidata is a great point of reference for works small and big.


Wikidata's data structure and default querying mechanisms may be
intimidating at first, but things start to make sense quickly with some
familiarity with its core logic and key concepts. Tools commonly used
by data journalists such as OpenRefine and the R programming language
(via the `tidywikidatar` package) can also be effectively used to make
the complexity much more manageable.


Use cases, pitfalls, and practical examples of including Wikidata in
your data journalism workflows, from exploring sanctioned entities and
persons, to analysing street names. Understand how Wikidata stores data, and how that information can be retrieved systematically with different tools to be employed in data and investigative journalism workflows.