This post is a follow up to the session I hosted at WikidataCon 2017 along with Stuart Prior from WikimediaUK (standing in for John Cummings, Wikimedian in Residence at UNESCO) Data partnerships with reputable third parties are really important for the future of Wikidata. If we get this right it will alleviate a lot of the manual work needed keeping general facts about the world up to date, whilst simultaneously giving greater authority to Wikidata in terms of completeness and accuracy (not to mention consistency!

Screenshot from the tool showing paintings by Vincent Van Gogh Two years ago, I attended Wikidata's 3rd birthday celebrations in the Wikimedia Deutschland offices in Berlin. One thing that stuck out to me was the amazing tools and work people were presenting as birthday presents to Wikidata. So, this year at WikidataCon, where we celebrated Wikidata's 5th birthday, it was a real pleasure to be able to present a new version of our tool for visualising Wikidata on interactive timelines.

In our opinion WikidataCon 2017 was a resounding success. We re-connected with many fellow Wikimedians and met new connections both inside and outside of the Wikimedia Community. The mood of the conference was one of improvement, collaboration and discussion, personally it felt like the unofficial theme of the conference was: "The potential impact of Wikidata on our world is immense, let's make sure we realise that potential" Few things worth doing are easy, and the Wikidata project is certainly not exempt from this rule, few projects outside of Wikipedia itself come close to the scope of what is trying to be achieved with Wikidata.

Making use once of Wikidata, and our new tool for creating live timelines from their ever expanding database, we have put together a few timelines of previous Academy Award Oscar winners. The timelines are created live from Wikidata and show the previous winners of the 4 acting awards and the award for best director. All the timelines are colour coded by the nationality of the recipient of the award. You can view the colour code, and use it as a quick filtering system, by clicking on the ink drop icon on the timeline.

Have you seen our new Wikidata timeline creator? It lets us make filterable timelines live from Wikidata (Wikipedia data) and the results are very impressive!! Below are some of the latest timelines created by us and other users who are already taking advantage of this new tool. The timelines generally have both a colour code and one or more filters you can use to refine the events visible on the timeline.

When we are busy creating new things, we sometimes forget to tell the world what we are doing. So here is a long overdue and hopefully very exciting update on what's being going on at Histropedia recently. HistropediaJS - Timeline Renderer The Biggest news is the launch of HistropediaJS, a JavaScript library that renders timelines using the same core engine as the main Histropedia site. The Library allows any data source to be visualised as an interactive timeline, with options for custom styling and features to be rendered with the timeline.

Any regular readers out there may have noticed a drop recently in blog posts, don’t fear this was a temporary pause while we concentrated on a few other projects. One of these is a new portal site which should be coming soon, including a new custom film timelines generator. Another cool thing we have been doing is prototyping new potential features for Histropedia. One of these features is Colour Coded Timelines, and although we can’t yet offer you the ability to colour code timelines, we have started creating some colour coded timelines for you to enjoy.

Marlon Brando, Jr. (April 3, 1924 – July 1, 2004) was an American actor and film director. He is hailed for bringing a gripping realism to film acting, and is widely considered to be one of the greatest and most influential actors of all time. Wikipedia To celebrate what would have been his 91st birthday we wanted to share a timeline of films featuring Brando, however there is no Wikipedia category for that.

This tutorial will teach you how create an instant timeline based on a specific location and radius. Just like the “descendants of” timelines from the previous tutorial these location based timelines are made using Wikidata queries To create the query we are going to select a specific location using a geo-coordinate and set a radius in km. The query then will then populate the timeline with all the events that have their location set within the defined radius.

New tutorial now available: Create instant location based timelines using Wikidata queries Our previous tutorial showed you how to use a Wikidata query to create a “descendants of” timeline. This time we are going to look at how we can combine some of the examples from the previous post to make more refined timelines and explore some other properties you can use to refine the query. If you haven’t read the previous post you probably want to take a look at it before continuing.

New tutorial now available: Create instant location based timelines using Wikidata queries Using the incredible querying power of Wikidata, Histropedia can now automatically create an instant timeline showing descendants of anyone who has a Wikipedia article. Don't worry if creating a timeline using a Wikidata Query sounds daunting and complicated, it's actually fairly simple, especially with our step by step guide to show you how it’s done. For this example we will be making a timeline showing descendants of Queen Victoria.

Here at Histropedia the whole team is really excited about the upcoming Wikimedia event this August. In an extreme stoke of good luck Wikimania is being held in London this year, and as a London based start-up that wouldn't exist if it wasn't for Wikipedia the timing for us could not be better. We are looking forward to meeting as many Wikipedians as we can over the course of the event, including the fringe events and hackathons scheduled for June and July.

We have recently switched Histropedia’s primary source for event dates from Wikipedia to Wikidata. We are still using Wikipedia as a date source and all the events remain linked to a Wikipedia article, but now whenever possible we are trying to use dates from Wikidata. This is a major improvement for us because Wikidata stores dates in a very different way to Wikipedia, where there is no set format for date entry.