Explore, Analyse and Translate Multilingual Wikidata Properties

Workshop Presentation at ContribuLing 2021 on June 4, 2021

Wikidata is highly evolving. New properties are proposed, discussed, created and deleted regularly. It is highly difficult to know the latest information on the total count of properties, new properties, new data types, new WikiProjects, supported languages etc. unless contributors write (complex) queries on the Wikidata query service. Users, especially newcomers who wish to contribute do not know various ways by which they can document and contribute. Take, for example, users often ask the questions how to document a historical monument, person, book, software, etc.

WDPropp provides a visual interface to answer such questions. It also helps the users in understanding and improving multilingual information related to Wikidata properties. Every property has three major pieces of information that require to be translated: label, description, and aliases. A property may have none, some, or all of this information in any given language. Thus for any given language, properties can be therefore be separated into two categories: translated properties and untranslated properties. A contributor may wish to focus on translating the labels or a particular set of properties like those belonging to a particular property class or a WikiProject. WDProp helps contributors in finding properties that require translation. The users can also visualize the historical translation process and even detect possible vandalism. Finally, users can also search relevant WikiProjects related to their domain.