{"id":2186,"date":"2025-01-28T09:29:23","date_gmt":"2025-01-28T09:29:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/exponentialdecay.co.uk\/blog\/?p=2186"},"modified":"2025-12-01T16:59:51","modified_gmt":"2025-12-01T16:59:51","slug":"wikidata-mediawiki-wikidata-provenance-wikiprov","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/exponentialdecay.co.uk\/blog\/wikidata-mediawiki-wikidata-provenance-wikiprov\/","title":{"rendered":"wikidata + mediawiki = wikidata + provenance == wikiprov"},"content":{"rendered":"

Today I want to showcase a Wikidata proof of concept that I developed as part of my work integrating Siegfried and Wikidata<\/a>.<\/p>\n

That work is wikiprov<\/a> a utility to augment Wikidata results in JSON with the Wikidata revision history.<\/p>\n

For siegfried it means that we can showcase the source of the results being returned by an identification without having to go directly back to Wikidata, this might mean more exposure for individuals contributing to Wikidata. We also provide access to a standard permalink where records contributing to a format identification are fixed at their last edit. Because Wikidata is more mutable than a resource like PRONOM this gives us the best chance of understanding differences in results if we are comparing siegfried+Wikidata results side-by-side.<\/p>\n

I am interested to hear your thoughts on the results of the work. Lets go into more detail below.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

A (go)lang and winding road…<\/h2>\n

A lot of the work I do flies under the radar, but especially in this instance where my work on two tools spargo and then wikiprov were specifically about supporting my work on siegfried<\/a>, a tool for format identification developed by Richard Lehane.<\/p>\n

We’ve gone into the work before, but Yale University Library asked whether Richard or myself could add a Wikidata identifier to the tool. We could, and so we did!<\/p>\n

Because siegfried uses no external dependencies, relying wholly on the Golang standard library whether in siegfried itself or the dependencies created by Richard, I didn’t want to be the first to add anything external to the tool that couldn’t be directly maintained and so I created two SPARQL packages spargo and wikiprov. While both libraries sit in my repositories, they only use standard library features and they can always be handed to Richard in the future.<\/p>\n

spargo<\/a> and wikiprov<\/a> are both packages created for querying SPARQL endpoints in Golang. spargo is generic library that can potentially be adopted in most SPARQL cases. Wikiprov is the title of this blog and adds functionality specific to Wikidata, specifically MediaWiki+Wikidata, and I hope is far more interesting.<\/p>\n

wikidata + provenance<\/h2>\n

We know that there is a complex history of edits that go into making resources like Wikipedia. In fact, developers have created ways to visualize or even listen to these edits, such as this by \u00a0Stephen LaPorte<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Mahmoud Hashemi<\/a>.<\/p>\n