Tag: Aberdeen

One week to SODU2022 – time to start thinking

Do you ever get the feeling that patterns are emerging, the stars aligning, things coming together, coincidences happening more frequently? Of course there is a lot of magical thinking behind those feelings – but the sessions I’ve attended, books I’ve read, speakers I’ve heard, conversations I’ve participated in this week all point to the importance and significance of SODU 2022 next weekend.

Mid-week I had a conversation with represenatatives from Scottsh Government about a forthcoming refresh of their 2015 Open Data Strategy. I was part of the group which drew up the original strategy. Between the drafting and the publication of final version, any sense that implementing the strategy was mandatory was lost. Some of us warned that this would lead to low adoption and therefore low impact in terms of data being released. We were, it is sad to say, proved correct. Of course the published strategy does say that Scotland’s data is to be open by default, but in practice it is anything but that.

In 2019 I estimated that over 95% of public sector data that should be open remained closed. And one look at the automatically-generated live table of local authority open data coverage shows what a long way there is to go!

While it is pleasing to hear that the Scottish Government is refreshing its open data strategy, the reason for that refresh is not, as far as I can tell, to make open data manadatory or to put measures in place to benchmark performance. As far as we can ascertain no-one monitors or has monitored the implementation of the 2015 strategy; even to the extent of counting as we did in 2019 the number of datasets released, itself a crude measure, And if I read the runes correctly, that commitment to data open by default might not make it in to the next iteration of the strategy which would be a major leap backwards. Civic society needs to make their feelings known about this in the strongest possible terms.

On Friday I gave a presentation to the University of Aberdeen’s Open Access Week’s Open Data event. I spoke about making open data useful, useable and used. The talk was one of half a dozen. I found the talks by each of the others speakers very good – but the one by Paola Masuzzo very impactful. The scenarios she spoke of in the struggle to get good government data resonated with the fight I and others put up to get Covid Data released in 2020. Paola is on the board of On Data and their website has a lot of great content. Unless you are fluent in Italian you might be better allowing Google to translate it if you open it in Chrome browser.

Another conversation that I have been having is with Jack and Karen, my colleagues in the Open Data Scotland project. This was born at Code The City hack weekends and previous SODU sessions. Should it remain as a CTC project? Should we spin it off as its own Community Interest Company? What is its role beyond being an open data portal? In my view we need to be more of a lobbying, pressure group for OD in Scotland. For example I believe that one week away from SODU2022 we have one person from the whole of the public sector in Scotland attending for only one day. There should at least be be someone there from every council health board, government agency etc. That would mean about 180 government attendees. But if their job doesn’t have open data at its core, and there is no obligation to publish, and no consequences to not doing so, why bother publishing? And why bother attending this weekend event?

It could be argued that since the Digital Strategy 2021 in Scotland does recognise the economic vlaue of open data then some of the core digital team with a responibility for implementing that should be there?

It was higlighted at SODU2021 and 2020, if I recall correctly, that there is a gap between government and civic society, and that the enormous goodwill and positivity of the civic group is a resource which government ignores and squanders. Chatting to someone else this week we puzzled to understand why the public sector is so afraid of engagement? Is there a sense that they know they are failing at OD and seek to avoid questioning? We know that several civil servants say they are committed to OD, but that there is no ministerial support in Scotland. Could that be it? We are a genuinely friendly community – and would welcome them with open arms.

This week I’ve been listening to the audio version of The Moves That Matter: A Grandmaster on the Game of Life by Jonathan Rowson, who I knew when he was a teenager in Aberdeen. At one point Jonathan said something about chess that I’ve long thought about applying to open data. He argues that chess “falls through the cultural cracks and lacks a stable cultural category that honours all of its elements; chess is more than a sport but is less than sport; chess is educational and educative but is not education; chess is full of artistic ideas but is not art; … is in many ways scientific but it not science“. He draws from this that without a cultural category that corresponds to a government department that would fund it, or a media section that would report it, it goes underfunded and unreported. The parallels with open data are deep. What IS open data? How do we get it funding and supported in `government? And recognition and attention?

Today was Wikidata‘s 10th birthday. I’m a big fan of Wikidata – and I train people to use it on behalf of Wikimedia UK. I also give guest lectures at RGU to Master students on the topic. We’ve used Wikidata in many projects at CTC hack events too. I’m convinced that Wikidata has a significant role to play as a place for publicly-curated linked open data – and filling in for missing ‘official’ government data,

Finally, I was contacted by someone who had attended the UK Open Data Camp that we hosted in 2018 in Aberdeen. He’s now living in Orkney and having heard about SODU2022 he’s making the journey down to attend, which is great to hear. We always look forward to catching up with the broader community.

Personally, I can’t wait to be at SODU2022. I hope that you do to and that we can have some meaningful discussions on the points above and much more!

If you haven’t booked yet you can still grab a ticket now.

[Published 29 Oct 2022. Edited 30 Oct to correct spelling errors and for readability.]

Header photo by israel palacio on Unsplash

Opening the data on Aberdeen Convicts – part 1

A guest blog-post by Sara Mazzoli, a post-graduate student at Edinburgh University, who has been interning at Code The City for the last three months. During this project she has worked closely with us and with the Aberdeen City and Aberdeenshire Archives.

Introduction: what is the Register of Returned Convicts?

Historical context, use and description

The Register of Returned Convicts of Aberdeen (1869-1939) is a fascinating, “small-but-chunky” (Astley, 2021) volume contained in the Aberdeen and Aberdeenshire Archives, comprising a total of 279 entries. It is located in the Grampian police collection of the Archives. Out of these entries, about sixty feature mug shots – which can be seen here.

As suggested by the register’s title, the register was used to take note of convicts’ addresses upon release. In fact, Phil Astley – Aberdeen’s Archivist – explained to us that this register contains information on convicts that were sentenced to Penal Servitude (often noted in the register as P.S.). 

The Penal Servitude Act, enforced in 1857, was meant to substitute transportation with a prison sentence. This specific sentence consisted of three parts: solitary confinement; labour and release on licence. This latter element meant that individuals sentenced to P.S. had to report monthly to the police during their licence time. Also, they had to report any change in address within 48 hours. 

A typical page of the Register looks like this:

As it can be seen, at the top of each page of the register, information was noted on convicts’ physical traits and age upon release, as well as conviction and sentence. In the “Marks” section, anything noteworthy – such as tattoos, scars, deformities and moles – was written down. In fact, according to Phil Astley the industrialisation process determined a high incidence of accidents in factories. Therefore, disfigurements were common amongst workers. 

At the bottom half of the page, the register featured information on the convicts’ addresses after their sentence ended. Most of the addresses of the people noted in the register were in Aberdeen. However, some also moved to nearby towns and villages – such as Dundee – or to bigger cities, such as Edinburgh and Glasgow. 

Moreover, Phil suggested that there are other two particular acts that shaped the register. 

  • The Habitual Offenders Act 1869. 
  • The Prevention of Crimes Act of 1871. This act 

Simply put, these two acts tightened former criminals’ liberties, and enhanced police monitoring of these individuals. These laws were in fact especially crafted to fight habitual criminals (Radzinowicz and Hood, 1980): with increasing urbanization, authorities were concerned with what they labelled as “criminal classes”, an expression by which they referred to individuals who mainly lived through criminal activities. The Register can ultimately be understood as an example of the attempt to monitor the movements of these repeat offenders.

The mugshots and the “habitual criminal”

The camera was developed in the first half of the Nineteenth century, and was initially seen as a tool to represent bodies in a realistic manner. Indeed, photography was depicted as an objective and neutral representation of reality, and therefore authorities started using this tool for law enforcement since the 1840s: “Given its material features and its cultural value as an objective form of representation, the camera provided the perfect tool for the documentation, classification, and regulation of the body within the carceral network” (Finn, 2009, p. 29). 

Indeed, at first, as the concept of “mug shot” was developing, photos of individuals in the Register lacked a unique formatting, which started to appear in the 1890s. Indeed, as claimed by Finn (2009), mug shots developed from the Nineteenth-century portrait. These portraits featured an individual sitting, with no facial expression, and were usually taken from the front. As it can be seen, the first few mug shots look more like portraits compared to the later ones. For example:

 Fig 1: two mug shots from the Register of the Returned Convicts (1869-1939). The first one, depicts Ann Mc Govern, released in 1872. The second one is the mug shot of John Proctor, discharged in 1893.

According to Holligan and Maitra (2018, p. 173), mug shots were established and developed in a milieu of “pessimism about classes of society”. Moreover, the development of criminal anthropology led to a more wide-spread use of photography in carceral settings. Scholars of this field of studies, such as Cesare Lombroso, believed that certain physical characteristics could yield the identification of criminals. The believed objectivity of photography meant that mug shots could further inform these studies; as characteristics found in mugshots could be analysed by criminal anthropologists. At the same time, the popularity of criminal anthropology led this field of studies also to shape law enforcement practices; first and foremost, by shaping the practices of mug shots taking and of noting distinguishing marks. 

Specifically, mug shots were introduced in the UK thanks to the above-mentioned Prevention of Crimes Act of 1871: “Under the section 7 of the Prevention of Crime Act 1871 it was recommended that convicted prisoners be photographed before release, full and side face,measurements in millimetres and feet and inches to be made of length and width of head, and lengths of arms,feet and left middle finger including the papillary ridges of the ten fingers as well as distinctive marks by position on body” (Holligan & Maitra, 2018, p. 177). Indeed, Holligan and Maitra (2018) contend that the development of criminal anthropology led to the belief that “habitual criminals” could be identified by some specific marks; such as the length of imbs. Some of these marks were collected and published by the British Registry of Distinctive Marks, which regulated and influenced the ways in which authorities saw and noted distinguishing marks on prisoners. 

Ultimately, we aim to argue that this Victorian construction of crime and of the criminal influenced the way in which the register is composed as well, and that the meaning of “crime” and “criminal” are dictated by moral and social standards. Indeed, many were arrested due to charges of Theft “Habit & Repute” which, according to Dr. Darby, means considering someone’s as having a “bad character, a bad name for theft specifically, and that other witnesses considered him a bad person”. Analysing the register means considering those social rules that shaped the way in which the register is written. 

It is in our opinion fundamental to acknowledge such dimensions of the register as we open its data. It is in fact important to recognize that “Registers are political” (Ziegler, 2020), and that therefore the categories of the register are constructed. However, it must also be acknowledged that their construction does not make these categories any less impactful on individuals’ lives.  Indeed, this is why we embrace attempts such as that of Phil, who tried to retrieve the humanity of the individuals in the register by associating their mug shots to stories; as we shall argue in the next paragraph. 

Why this project is important: how did everything start?

Phil Astley explained that the interest in the register was built up during the 2019 and 2020 Granite Noir festival exhibitions, to which the Archives provided 19th century wanted posters, photos of 1930s crime scenes, as well as mug shots contained in the Register. 

Indeed, the mug shots had attracted a positive response, and Phil started the Criminal Portraits blog, in which he started exploring the stories of returned convicts whose mug shots are contained in the register. Therefore, Phil has published more than 50 blog posts, drawing on heterogeneous sources, such as newspapers of the time and censuses. The blog has attracted more than 20 thousand views.

In discussing the plans for this project with Phil and Ian Watt of Code The City we agreed that opening up the data contained in the register – making it available as Open Data – would have social and other benefits. 

According to the Open Data Handbook, open data is data that can be easily available and re-usable by anyone. There are many values pertaining to open data. Indeed, it can allow for more transparency, and therefore institutions’ or organizations’ accountability. Moreover, it can also prompt economic participation and investment by private companies. Finally, open data can enable citizen participation and engagement, as it is with this project. 

In this specific case, we decided to open data from the register precisely because of the public interest it attracted. Not only is the life of the individuals contained in the register fascinating in itself, but we would argue that opening up this data has also a greater social value. For example, it would allow for individuals with a genealogical interest to find out more about their possible ancestors; or it could be useful for researchers who are carrying out their work on criminality in Scotland. 

In any case, opening up data from the Archives could lead to more interest towards their rich collections, as well as to a more thorough understanding of these collections’ communal utility.

It was agreed that we would use Wikidata as the place to host the data, given Code The City’s and Ian’s knowledge of, and enthusiasm, for this platform. 

How we made the data available

In the second part of this blog we will detail how we transcribed the data, prepared it for Wikidata, uploaded it in bulk, published mugshot photos and linked those. 

References

Astley, P. [Aberdeen Performing Arts]. (2021, February 23). Phil Astley – Criminal Portaits Webinar – Granite Noir 2021 [Video]. YouTube.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UFcOG_7Cv0I&t=2346s 

Darby, N. (2014, 11 28). The ‘habit and repute’ thief in Scottish law. Retrieved from Dr Nelly Darby. Criminal Historian:
www.criminalhistorian.com/the-habit-and-reute-thief-in-scottish-law/

Finn, J. M. (2009). Capturing the criminal image: From mug shot to surveillance society. U of Minnesota Press.

McLean, R., Maitra, D. E. V., & Holligan, C. (2017). Voices of quiet desistance in UK prisons: Exploring emergence of new identities under desistance constraint. The Howard journal of crime and justice, 56(4), 437-453

Open Knowledge Foundation. (n.d.). Open Definition: Defining Open in Open Data, Open Content and Open Knowledge. Retrieved from Open Knowledge Foundation:
https://opendefinition.org/od/2.1/en/ 

Radzinowicz, L., & Hood, R. (1980). Incapacitating the habitual criminal: The English
experience. Michigan Law Review, 78(8), 1305-1389.

Ziegler, S. L. (2020). Open Data in Cultural Heritage Institutions: Can We Be Better Than Data Brokers?. Digital Humanities Quarterl, 14(2).

Mapping Memorials to Women in Aberdeen

This project, which was part of CTC20,  grew from a WMUK / Archaeology Scotland join project carried out by Scottish Graduate School of Arts & Humanities intern Roberta Leotta during lockdown 2020. More details about the background to the project can be found here.

It’s often touted that there are some cities in Scotland (coughEdinburghcough) where there are more statues to animals than there are to women. In my own work transferring OpenPlaques data to Wikidata I’ve observed that there are more entries for Charles Rennie Macintosh than there for women in Glasgow. So in this light, it’s somewhat refreshing to work on a project that celebrates all kinds of memorials to women in Scotland.

The Women of Scotland: Mapping Memorials project began in 2010 as a joint project between Glasgow Women’s Library, and Women’s History Scotland. It’s similar in many ways to OpenPlaques, but using Wikidata could add an extra dimension – let’s increase the coverage of women’s history and culture on the Wikimedia projects by getting these memorials and the women they celebrate into Wikidata, use that to identify gaps in knowledge, and then work to fill the gap.

Over the two days, here’s what we did:

Data collection

We scraped the initial list of data from Mapping Memorials website manually, and created a shared worksheet based on a model that’s been used previously for other cities. (The manual process is slow, and a bit fiddly, and is the one thing that I wouldn’t do again. We’re in contact with the admin so going forward, I’m hopeful that we wouldn’t need to repeat this step in the future.)

Once we had this list, we could create a more automated process to deal with gathering the other pieces of information we needed to create new, good quality Wikidata items, although some (description, for example) needed a human eye.

Wikidata identifiers

We were using two main identifiers on Wikidata – P8048 (Women of Scotland memorial ID) and P8050 (Women of Scotland subject ID). The former for the entries to the memorials themselves, and the latter for the women they celebrate. Where the women didn’t have entries, we could create those, and then link them to the entries for the memorials.

Both identifiers use the last part of the URL for each entry on the Mapping Memorials site, so that was fairly easy to do in Google docs. Once we had that info, it’s an easy enough step to bulk-create items either using Quickstatements or Wikibase CLI.

Creating items & avoiding duplicates

There’s a plug in for Google Sheets called Wikipedia and Wikidata Tools which has some useful features for projects like this – WikidataQID for looking up whether something already exists on Wikidata, and WikidataFacts, which tells you what that item is. The former is ok if you have an exact match, the latter is really useful for flagging anything which might lead to a disambiguation page, for example.

Ultimately we did end up with a few duplicates that needed to be merged, but this was pretty easily managed, and it really showed how useful it is to have local knowledge involved in local projects – there were a couple of sets of coordinates that were obviously wrong, but also some errors that wouldn’t have been spotted by someone unfamiliar with the area.

Coordinates and dates

I really like Quickstatements, but there are a few areas in which it’s fiddly, including coordinates and dates. I’m really interested in looking further into Wikibase CLI for dates in particular, as the process there for dates (documented here) looks to be substantially easier in terms of data prep than it does in Quickstatements. Many thanks to Tony for that work, as his expertise saved us a lot of time! He also used that tool to create items for those women commemorated who were missing from Wikidata, documented here.

As with dates, coordinates are entered into Quickstatements in a different format than that which you’d use manually inside Wikidata itself, hence the formatting you’ll see in column Q on the Data collection tab. Most of this we had to grab from Google Maps, which again is a bit fiddly.

Quickstatements

Once we had a master list of QIDs for the memorials we were working with, we could use Quickstatements to bulk upload sets of statements to those items.

For example, matching the memorials to the women commemorated, using this format:

Screenshot of a spreadsheet showing QID for memorials and the women they commemorate
Screenshot of a spreadsheet showing QID for memorials and the women they commemorate

The Q numbers on the left are those of the memorials, P547 is “commemorates”, and the Q numbers on the right are those of the women celebrated. We were also able to add P8050 (Women of Scotland subject ID) to some women who already had entries on Wikidata, but no WoS ID.

Screenshot of a spreadsheet showing each memorial QID and its type
Screenshot of a spreadsheet showing each memorial QID and its type

The Q number on the left again is the memorial, P31 is “instance of”, and the Q number on the right corresponds to a type of thing – a commemorative plaque, a garden, or a road, for example.

Once you’ve got the info in this format, it’s just a case of copy & pasting into QS, clicking import, and then run. (Note – you do need to be an autoconfirmed user to use QS, which means that your account must be at least 4 days old, and having more than 50 edits.) It’s relatively easy, and I was pleased that one of our relatively-new-to-Wikidata participants had the chance to make her first bulk uploads (description & commons category) using the tool over the weekend.

Photos

This project grew out of a desire to increase the coverage of Scottish heritage on Wikimedia Commons, so it was great to take some time on this. Mapping Memorials does have some images, but they’re not openly licensed, and others are missing. After Wikimedia Commons, our next port of call was Geograph, where many images have been released on Wiki-compatible Creative Commons licenses. Using Geograph2Commons, images can easily be transferred over to Wikimedia Commons, so that they can be used in any Wikimedia Project. Geograph also links to this feature from their site – click on “Find out how to reuse this image”, and then scroll down to “Wikipedia template for image page”, then click on the “geograph2commons” link. Really simple. Our group did some detective work for images, and then added them to Commons, and linked them manually to the Wikidata item.

This gave us a list of missing images… which is fine, but wouldn’t it be better to see them on a map?

Visualisation and filling the gaps

Thanks to Ian’s tutorial on how to create a custom WikiShootMe map, we were able to create a custom map that showed us which of the memorials we were working on had images, which didn’t, and where they were. That map is here, and it was great to see it slowly turn more green than red over the weekend as we found more images, or as volunteers headed out across Aberdeen between days to take missing pictures.

A screenshot of a clickable map where people can upload photos of monuments
A screenshot of a clickable map where people can upload photos of monuments

One of the small, but very satisfying, things you can do with these kinds of images is to integrate them into relevant Wikipedia articles. I added images from the project to the articles for Aberdeen Town House, Caroline Phillips, and Katherine Grainger. At the time of writing, around 2500 people have viewed those articles since I added the images.

Next steps

Over the course of the weekend we added 77 new memorials, and 26 new women to Wikidata, as well as a whole host of new photos. These entries all had some quite rich data, and as complete as we could make it.

We were surprised to see some of the individuals who didn’t have a Wikipedia article – and of course, we can use the Wikidata query service to identify those gaps. The queries below could give us a great starting point for an editathon, or indeed, for any Wikipedia editor interested in writing Women’s biography.

  • Wikidata query for women with a Women of Scotland subject ID, a memorial in Aberdeen, but no enwiki article: https://w.wiki/YVH
  • Wikidata query for women with a Women of Scotland subject ID, but no enwiki article: https://w.wiki/YVG

Huge thanks to the team, and to Code the City for another great hack weekend!

Dr Sara Thomas
Scotland Programme Coordinator, Wikimedia UK

——————————————————————————

Header image: The Grave of Jessie Seymour Irvine by Ian Watt on Wiki Commons  (CC-BY-SA)

Aberdeen Built Ships – an update at CTC20

This project was commenced at CTC19 on 11th -12th April. The aim was to import from Aberdeen Built Ships (with the permission of the Galleries and Museums Service who operate it) a complete set of data on those 3000+ ships into Wikidata data in as clean and well-formatted state as possible.

We got part of the way there at CTC19, and in work done in the following weeks, but the data had still not been imported.

CTC20 progress

We had in the weeks since CTC19, we had identified issues with two significant aspects of the data in the core ABS system: a lack of standardisation of ship types (meaning that there were up to nine variants of a single type) and a similar issue with ship builders.

For the purposes of CTC20 we agreed to set these aside and press ahead with an import of core data for each ship we could – and to revisit the specific details above later.

What was done

Core data was imported into Wikidata for most of the ships. We excluded some ships from the import if the name field was blank or UNKNOWN or UNNAMED. Other, existing, ships had an ABS ID added to their item. This has resulted in 3085 ships in Wikidata with an ABS ID at the time of writing.

Screenshot of Samuel Plimsoll
Screenshot of Samuel Plimsoll

Method

We initially tried to use the CSV format for wikidata quickstatements, but couldn’t get this to work so switched to the TSV version. A python script was written to write the quickstatements file that could then be copied into the quickstatements batch import tool. The import had 2 errors for ships that had a range of years in the Date so generated invalid dates in the quickstatements. These (and 2 duplicates that I noticed after the import) are noted to correct later.

The ABS ID property (P8260) was manually added to the ships that already existed in wikidata.

The mappings between QID and ABS ID was found from SPARQL query:

SELECT ?qid ?absid
WHERE
{
  ?qid wdt:P8260 ?absid.
}

Next Steps?

To complete the project the following needs to be done

  • Add Country of Origin (P495) to all existing Aberdeen-built ships in Wikidata. This will suppress the warning messages when viewing each ship.
  • Rationalise all ship builders that exist in ship_builders.csv – deduplicating these and create Wikidata entries for each we will use.
  • Rationalise all ship types that exist in ship_types.csv – deduplicating these and create Wikidata entries for each we will use.
  • Update each ship with specific type and ship builder.
  • Extract / rationalise data from some of the fields, e.g. we have one dimensions field rather than separate fields for length/beam/draft/… and what’s there is inconsistent
  • Isolate ships that have no Wikidata identifier – i.e. any one not in the list of 59 positive matches. Set aside those which have entries for later processing.
  • Source and add pictures of the ships in ABS (see below)
  • Develop a means of monitoring both the original ABS system (rescrape periodically and do a diff on the file in some way? ) and monitor Wikidata for changes to the ships records (Wikidata query, executed periodically, generating a CSV download and checked for differences from previous runs?) to feed back to ABS.

Images of ships

ships with images
Ships with images

Despite there now being 3,085 Aberdeen-built ships in Wikidata only 12 of these (or 0.388%) has a picture associated with them. There is a significant opportunity to work with Aberdeen Museums to add images from their extensive collection to Wiki Commons and associate these with the ships now in Wikidata.

Header image Twice & Rinina25 / CC BY-SA https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/aa/Genova-Tall_Ship-IMG_1509.JPG/512px-Genova-Tall_Ship-IMG_1509.JPG

Aberdeen Built Ships

This project was one of several initiated at the fully-online Code the City 19 History and Data event.

It’s purpose is to gather data on Aberdeen-built ships, with the permission of the site’s owners, and to push that refined bulk data, with added structure, onto Wikidata as open data, with links back to the Aberdeen Ships site through using a new identifier.

By adding the data for the Aberdeen Built Ships to Wikidata we will be able to do several things including

  • Create a timeline of ship building
  • Create maps, charts and graphs of the data (e.g. showing the change in sizes and types of ships over time
  • Show the relative activity of the many shipbuilders and how that changed
  • Link ship data to external data sources
  • Improve the data quality
  • Increase engagement with the ships database.

The description below is largely borrowed from the ReadMe file of the project’s Github Repo.

Progress to date

So far the following has been accomplished, mainly during the course of the weekend.

Next Steps?

To complete the project the following needs to be done

  • Ensure that the request for an identifier for ABS is created for use by us in adding ships to Wikidata. A request to create an identifier for Aberdeen Ships is currently pending.
  • Create Wikidata entities for all shipbuilders and note the QID for each. We’ve already loaded nine of these into WikiData.
  • Decide on how to deal with the list of ships that MAY be already in Wikidata. This may have to be a manual process. Think about how we reconcile this – name / year / tonnage may all be useful.
  • Decide on best route to bulk upload – eg Quickstatements. This may be useful: Wikidata Import Guide
  • Agree a core set of data for each ship that will parsed from ships.json to be added to Wikidata – e.g. name, year, builder, tonnage, length etc
  • Create a script to output text that can be dropped into a CSV or other file to be used by QuickStatements (assuming that to be the right tool) for bulk input ensuring links for shipbuilder IDs and ABS identifiers are used.

We will also be looking to get pictures of the ships published onto Wiki Commons with permissive licences, link these to the Wiki Data and increase and improve the number of Wikipedia articles on Aberdeen Ships in the longer-term.

Header Image of a Scale Model of Thermopylae at Aberdeen Maritime Museum By Stephencdickson – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0