SICSS: Using Wikipedia

These materials were designed to provide early career researchers working in computational social science with hands-on experience on how data from Wikipedia and Wikidata can be accessed and used.

Particularly, for the use in the annual, two-week-long Summer Institutes in Computational Social Science as part of an ongoing community project, which brings researchers from diverse backgrounds, from people who are new to programming to technical experts, together with Wikimedians.

These materials are a follow-up to introductory lectures about Wikipedia/Wikimedia, how the Wiki model works, and how the data has successfully be used for research before.

The materials cover the following:

1. Introduction: A quick recap of what Wikipedia/Wikidata is, how to ethically use it, and common misconceptions
2. Basic data access: What are different ways of accessing data from Wikis and getting started with PyWikiBot and PAWS)
3. Using Wikidata: An intro to the Wikidata data model and how to query Wikidata
4. End-to-end example: A full example combining Wikidata and getting data from Wiki pages
5. Practical exercises: Five practical exercises for different technical levels

The first four interactive units are expected to fill around 3 hours.