Wikipedia:Persondata
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Persondata is a special set of metadata that can and should be added to biographical articles (only). It consists of standardized data fields with basic information about the biographee (name, birth and death days, and places of birth and death) that, unlike conventional Wikipedia content, can be automatically extracted and processed by cataloging tools and then used for a variety of purposes, such as providing advanced search capabilities, statistical analysis, automated categorization, and birthday lists.
Adding the {{persondata}} template to a biographical article doesn't affect its normal display, since the information isn't meant to be read by human beings and remains hidden unless the user changes his personal stylesheet specifically for it to appear.
As of May 8, 2008, there are over 21,000 articles with persondata. (As of December 2007, the German Wikipedia had over 188,000 articles with "Personendaten".)
A new WikiProject, WikiProject Persondata, is seeking contributors.
Contents |
[edit] Motivation
Without uniform formatting, it is very difficult to automatically extract useful information from biographical articles. It is also impossible to automatically alphabetize all the biographical articles since the titles typically begin with the person's first name. By adding standardized metadata to such articles, we can facilitate the creation of new applications for Wikipedia content, such as Wikipedia CD-ROMs, custom search applications, etc. Hopefully, this will be the first of many steps towards enriching Wikipedia with semantic content.
[edit] Viewing persondata
By default, persondata is invisible to normal users. In order to make persondata visible, you must:
- Either install this JavaScript, which will add a button to the top button bar of every page allowing you to easily show and hide persondata boxes;
- Or edit your user stylesheet as explained below, causing persondatas to be always visible;
- Or even do both, as one method doesn't interfere with the other and the above JavaScript has useful persondata-editing features.
To make persondatas permanently visible, first make sure you are logged in. Then create a page at User:YourUserName/monobook.css and add the following line:
table.persondata {display:table;}
or, if you use Microsoft Internet Explorer:
table.persondata {display:block;}
Tip: After saving User:YourUserName/monobook.css, please empty the Browser-Cache to see the changes: Mozilla/Firefox: Ctrl-Shift-R; Internet Explorer: Ctrl-F5; Opera: F5; Safari: ⌘-R; Konqueror: Ctrl-R.
If you can see a block with data about Ferdinand Magellan between this paragraph and the next, you have successfully made persondata visible:
| Persondata | |
|---|---|
| NAME | Magellan, Ferdinand |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Magalhães, Fernão de (Portuguese); Magallanes, Fernando de (Spanish) |
| SHORT DESCRIPTION | Sea explorer |
| DATE OF BIRTH | Spring 1480 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Sabrosa, Portugal |
| DATE OF DEATH | April 27, 1521 |
| PLACE OF DEATH | Mactan Island, Cebu, Philippines |
Otherwise this paragraph will follow direct below the previous one.
To make the persondata box invisible again, simply remove the CSS line provided above from your user stylesheet.
Warning: Since persondatas are by default invisible, editors rarely plan for them when designing the layout of an article, what means that making them visible might cause some article bottoms to look strange for you. For the same reason, if you have persondatas visible while editing and previewing, remember that most people don't, so planning the layout to accommodate it might cause them to find a strange-looking article bottom. Thus, take care to edit from the perspective of the majority.
[edit] Using the template
To use the {{Persondata}} template, copy the wikitext below to the end of a biographical article and fill in the parameters manually, or use this javascript which can add the template and fill in the information semi-automatically from infoboxes. If you add the template manually, place it just before the categories and interlanguage links. ({{DEFAULTSORT:Sort key}} is not a real template but direct part of categorization, and therefore should be located between persondata and categories. The same applies to the {{Lifetime}} template, which implements DEFAULTSORT.)
<!-- Metadata: see [[Wikipedia:Persondata]] -->
{{Persondata
|NAME =
|ALTERNATIVE NAMES =
|SHORT DESCRIPTION =
|DATE OF BIRTH =
|PLACE OF BIRTH =
|DATE OF DEATH =
|PLACE OF DEATH =
}}
Next, fill out the data fields. Make sure the name is entered with the surname first (the same way you would with a category listing). Do not delete empty data fields, for example, if a person is still alive, you'll leave the date and place of death blank. Here is an example of a properly filled out template:
<!-- Metadata: see [[Wikipedia:Persondata]] -->
{{Persondata
|NAME = Magellan, Ferdinand
|ALTERNATIVE NAMES = Magalhães, Fernão de (Portuguese); Magallanes, Fernando de (Spanish)
|SHORT DESCRIPTION = Sea explorer
|DATE OF BIRTH = Spring 1480
|PLACE OF BIRTH = [[Sabrosa]], [[Portugal]]
|DATE OF DEATH = [[April 27]], [[1521]]
|PLACE OF DEATH = [[Mactan Island]], [[Cebu]], [[Philippines]]
}}
[edit] Fields
The fields NAME, ALTERNATIVE NAMES, SHORT DESCRIPTION, DATE OF BIRTH, PLACE OF BIRTH, DATE OF DEATH, and PLACE OF DEATH are used to construct a persondata record. These fields can possibly be extended in the future, and currently it isn't necessary to provide wikilinks in them; however, these might be useful in some future application, so feel free to add them if you wish.
Please follow these general guidelines when filling these fields:
[edit] Name and alternative names
When specifying the person's |NAME=, use the following format: [surname], [forename] [middle names], [title]. For most cases this will be straightforward. For example, "George Walker Bush" becomes "Bush, George Walker". In some cases, however, there may be ambiguity about a person's surname. When in doubt, format the name according to how you would expect it to be alphabetized. For example, Ludwig van Beethoven would be alphabetized under "Beethoven", while Townes Van Zandt would be alphabetized under "Van Zandt". If you're not sure, ask someone familiar with the subject how they would alphabetize the name or consult a cataloging guide such as the AACR2.
It is usually a good idea to list as much of a person's name as possible in the name field to avoid confusion with similar names. Do not include honorifics (such as "Dr.", "Professor", or "PhD") however, unless they are part of a title of nobility.
The optional |ALTERNATIVE NAMES= field is used to list other common (usually international) forms of the person name, but not simply abbreviated versions of the full name. It follows a similar pattern to the |NAME= field, but with added information: "NAME {language); NAME {language); NAME (language);...", adding as many names as needed to correctly identify the person.
[edit] Short Description
A small description of the person. Try to be concise but informative enough so that anyone reading this entry in a table will roughly know who the person is/was or do/did.
[edit] Dates of birth and death
Follow the Manual of Style guidelines when filling both the |DATE OF BIRTH= and |DATE OF DEATH= fields, including the guidelines for linking (i.e., only link full dates composed of day, month and year, not partial dates where only the year, or month and year, or season and year, are known).
Is particular, do not use templates within these fields, as they can interfere with data extraction. Abraham Lincoln's birthday, for example, should be listed as "February 12, 1809" or "[[February 12]], [[1809]]", not as "{{birth date|1809|2|12|mf=y}}".
[edit] Places of birth and death
Be specific, but not to the point of listing a street address. Usual formats are [city/village], [state/province], [country]; or [city], [country]; or [state/province], [country] etc. You can link to articles if you wish, and use pipes to produce a reasonable result, but try to be concise. For example, there's no need to link "Mount Juliet, Tennessee" as "[[Mount Juliet, Tennessee|Mount Juliet]], [[Tennessee]]" (resulting in "Mount Juliet, Tennessee") when "[[Mount Juliet, Tennessee]]" ("Mount Juliet, Tennessee") is available.
[edit] Examples
| Fieldname | Examples |
|---|---|
| NAME |
Magellan, Ferdinand |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES |
Magalhães, Fernão de (Portuguese); Magallanes, Fernando de (Spanish) |
| SHORT DESCRIPTION |
Sea explorer |
| DATE OF BIRTH |
1480 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | |
| DATE OF DEATH | |
| PLACE OF DEATH |
Mactan Island, Cebu, Philippines |
[edit] Extraction of persondata
[edit] With project Templatetiger
With project Templatetiger it is possible to view and output the data with:
[edit] From an SQL database
Using an SQL query, the persondata can be filtered from Wikipedia articles stored in a database. As an example, here is an SQL query that can be used to extract persondata:
SELECT
pages.cur_namespace,
pages.cur_title,
SUBSTRING(SUBSTRING(pages.cur_text FROM INSTR(pages.cur_text,'{{Persondata')), 1,
INSTR(SUBSTRING(pages.cur_text FROM INSTR(pages.cur_text,'{{Persondata')),'}}')+1)
AS 'Persondata'
FROM cur AS pd
JOIN templatelinks AS tl
ON pd.cur_namespace = tl.tl_namespace
AND pd.cur_title = tl.tl_title
JOIN cur AS pages
ON tl.tl_from = pages.cur_id
AND pages.cur_namespace = 0
WHERE pd.cur_namespace = 10
AND pd.cur_title = 'Persondata'
In order to be useful, however, the persondata must be further divided into individual data fields.
[edit] From the XML dump
Persondata can also be extracted from the regular Wikipedia database dumps. The following procedure has been adapted from scripts written to do this for the German Wikipedia by de:User:JakobVoss (who is also User:Nichtich). This is described (in German) at de:Hilfe:Personendaten/Datenextraktion. The process consists of four stages: downloading the database dump, extracting the persondata, parsing the persondata, and optionally loading it into a MySQL database. (This is an example of an Extract, transform, load process). As a rough guide, downloading the database dump will take a few hours with a fast internet connection, extracting the persondata will take around an hour, parsing the persondata and loading it into a MySQL database each take a few seconds.
[edit] System requirements
The original scripts were written for Linux, however they can also be run in Windows using either a Linux emulator such as Cygwin, or by downloading Windows versions of the necessary software:
- java (Most Windows machines will already have this installed)
- bzip2 Download here
- perl Download here
In addition if you want to load the extracted persondata into a MySQL database you will need MySQL (Download here).
[edit] Downloading the database dump
Database dumps can be found at http://download.wikimedia.org/enwiki. The subdirectories are named after the date of the dump. The file needed for extracting persondata is named enwiki-date-pages-articles.xml.bz2, e.g. enwiki-20070908-pages-articles.xml.bz2. The latest version of this file can always be found at http://download.wikimedia.org/enwiki/latest/enwiki-latest-pages-articles.xml.bz2. As of September 2007 this file is 2.8 GB in size. You may find it useful to use wget to download this.
[edit] Extracting persondata
Files needed:
Bzip2 is used to uncompress the dump, and the output is passed to three piped STX-scripts to extract the information in the persondata templates. STX is implemented in the java archive joost.jar.
The syntax for calling these scripts is
bzip2 -dc enwiki-20070908-pages-articles.xml.bz2 | java -jar joost.jar - addNamespaces.stx extractPersondata.stx pd2tab.stx > 20070908-extract.tab
This can be typed in at the command prompt in Linux or in Windows (Start->Run->cmd). Alternatively in Windows it can be typed into a text file with the .bat extension (e.g. extract.bat) which can then be run by double-clicking on it. Note that in Windows you will need to add type bzip2.exe instead, and if bzip2 is not in the same directory as the database dump you will need to specify the full file path (e.g. C:\full\file\path\bzip2.exe).
This process outputs a running total of the number of articles found with persondata. It also outputs a running total of articles with Template:PND. This is a legacy of the original German scripts; it was easier not to remove it when adapting them. (A Personennamendatei number is assigned to all German-speaking authors, and can be used to link to the catalogue of the German National Library. Some 30000 articles in the German Wikipedia use this template. A few hundred articles currently use it in the English Wikipedia.)
The output of this step is a tab-separated file (20070908-extract.tab in the above example) which contains the information from the persondata template.
[edit] Parsing persondata
File needed:
The information entered in the fields of the persondata template can take many forms, especially the dates. For many applications it is useful to have such information in standardised form. The Perl script transform.pl takes the XXXX-extract.tab file from the previous step and parses the fields to obtain quantities such as day, month, year, decade, century for the dates, given name and surname for names of the form Smith, John, article name where the first place in the birth/death place field is a wikilink, etc.
The syntax for this step is
transform.pl 20070908-extract.tab > 20070908-full.tab
This produces another tab-separated file. If desired this can be loaded into a spreadsheet and certain basic information obtained, by either sorting the columns or searching for appropriate terms, however more complicated analysis is more easily done using a database.
[edit] Loading persondata into a database
File needed:
If you have MySQL installed you can run table.sql to create a table called pub_pd_en, and load in the data from the XXXX-full.tab file. (You will need to change the filename at the end of table.sql).
Within MySQL the syntax to run this is
source C:/full/file/path/table.sql;
[edit] Linux scripts
In the original implementation on the German Wikipedia the whole process from extracting data to loading it into a database was performed by a single shell script, etl, which in turn called scripts extract.pl, transform.pl and load.pl. If you wish to use these they can be found at http://toolserver.org/~voj/pd/staging-area/. In addition to the modified files listed under the previous steps, some minor modifications to extract.pl and load.pl are necessary to use these for the English case, e.g. replacing de with en, and extractPersonendaten with extractPersondata in extract.pl, and using your own username in load.pl. The modified version of transform.pl given under Parsing persondata above should of course be used as well.
Files:
[edit] See also
- Template and corresponding example in Semantic Mediawiki (SMW); note that in SMW either the whole data field is a single link (relation), or the data field is not linked at all (attribute).
- hCard - a microformat with similar properties.
- WikiProject Persondata
