Include column for Wikidata identifier, suggestion

[ppKrauss]

Wikipedia have stable pages for all countries, and Wikidata supply an ID for it. Today Wikidata IDs are playing important role as "concept identifier", for Web Semantic in general and for open projects like OpenStreetMaps, etc.

Example: BR is https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q155 , so the column wd_id of line BR is Q155. With Wikidata API we can fill automatically the wd_id column.

[ewheeler]

Good suggestion @ppKrauss

Is there any listing of these stable country pages on wikidata? I've not found a listing/category for these or a way to crawl/fetch them all programmatically

[ppKrauss]

Hi @ewheeler, thanks (!), I will check best strategy next week. There are two ways,

1. Use a list of countries at Wikipedia as source, parsing it by a little adaptation in this wikitext2CSV script. Audit advantages: is human readable and audited by English-Wikipedia community.

2. Use SparQL and trust only in Wikidata, looking for all instances of Q6256... Or use some trusted DBpedia (as Wikidata curators) algorithm to get it.

The item 2 is the ideal solution and generates an automatic CSV.

[ppKrauss]

Testing solution of item 2,

SELECT ?item ?itemLabel 
WHERE {
  ?item wdt:P31 wd:Q6256.
  SERVICE wikibase:label { bd:serviceParam wikibase:language "[AUTO_LANGUAGE],en". }
}

run this query here and download as CSV to check JOIN.

---

Perhaps better! A CSV with only Wikidata-ID and 2-letter-country-code columns:

SELECT * 
WHERE {
  ?item wdt:P297 ?code
} ORDER BY ?code

here.

[ppKrauss]

Migration problem

Hi @ewheeler , can you help to check cause of errors at https://github.com/ppKrauss/country-codes ?
The dataset is good, but terminal goodtables datapackage.json say that no.

Wikidata minor problem

I am using SQL to check and JOIN... The JOIN is:

  SELECT  c.*, w.item as "wdId" 
  FROM dataset.vw_country_codes c LEFT JOIN wikidata_country w 
    ON w.code=c.iso3166_1_alpha_2 AND c.iso3166_1_alpha_2 IS NOT NULL 
    AND w.item NOT IN ('Q165783', 'Q2895', 'Q1249802', 'Q29999', 'Q407199', 'Q838261')

The wdId nulls are for Namibia and Sark only.

item	code	action
Q165783	BQ	delete
Q27561	BQ	preserve
Q2895	BY	delete
Q184	BY	preserve
Q1249802	FK	delete
Q9648	FK	preserve
Q29999	NL	delete
Q55	NL	preserve
Q407199	PS	delete
Q219060	PS	preserve
Q838261	YU	delete
Q83286	YU	preserve

The duplicated pairs are about Wikidata's records on "grouping nations" as "Kingdom of the Netherlands" in the NL pair.

[ppKrauss]

Hi @ewheeler, sorry for coming back so late ... Now the problems are solved, all be automatic.

Submiting pull request 65 to add sh wd_countries.sh in your makefile.

Supposing that you prefer to adapt your Python scripts to the join, a new column wd_id. You can join the tables on iso2_code=ISO3166-1-Alpha-2.

Only Sark is not there, because have no iso2_code, but you can add as Q3405693.

Wikidata have persistent IDs (it's safe!), so the rule of the thumb is to preserve the older Wikidata ID (wd_id) of a country when somebody try to duplicate it editing Wikidata. For "future new nations" the rule is to check Wikidata Item at the stable English Wikipedia page. The "manual filter" is the grep line at wd_countries.sh, and is cumulative.

[valerio-bozzolan]

What is the blockage at the moment? Is any help needed on this? :) Thank you so much!

[rufuspollock]

@valerio-bozzolan PR is welcome to add this.

[anuveyatsu]

Cool stuff - I'm only seeing this now 👍🏼 we have this old PR that we should merge #65