Category: software

Let’s describe emulators in Wikidata!

Screenshot of the Hercules emulator
Screenshot of the Hercules emulator by User:Kungfuman

There is a very useful list page on English Wikipedia called List of computer system emulators. The page contains a lot of structured data about emulators that is not yet in Wikidata.

Tool-builder Magnus Manske created Listeria to support lists on wikis that get their data from Wikidata. Magnus wrote a blog post about the tool that explains the functionality.

I wanted to see if I could recreate some of the structured data from the Wikipedia list page using Listeria. I have been working on describing configured computing environments as part of WikiProject Informatics. I created a subpage here for my Listeria experiment.

I decided to try this out on a subpage of a Wikidata WikiProject rather than on English Wikipedia because I wasn’t sure how the experiment would unfold, or how many of the columns would have values from Wikidata that would be displayed by the Listeria list.

screenshot of list generated by Listeria
Screenshot of the Computer system emulators list generated by Listeria

Writable file formats by software application

I was wondering what the state of data about writable file formats per software application is in Wikidata. Here is a visualization of the data as of today:
writeableffbubble

What I learned from this visualization is that we need to enter more data about what writable file formats are supported by various software applications. Please let me know if you are aware of sources that list information about writable file formats that could be scraped to supply additional statements for Wikidata!

Feel free to try this query yourself here. I look forward to re-running this query periodically to see how the process of making this data more complete unfolds.