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SPARQLing Scottish history

Aspects of Scottish history and culture using Wikidata and SPARQL

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Tag: Wikidata

Tracing epidemics

Adding basic Wikidata info for "Edinburgh plague of 1585" got me looking at the level of data for other infectious outbreaks, and finding it a wee bit bare. Even the relatively recent "1964 Aberdeen Read more
adminAuthor admin Posted on 19 April 2026 Category ScottishHistory Tags Wikidata SPARQL

Detriment to the built environment

After noting the Union Street fire in Wikidata, I revisited the previous query on disasters in the Glasgow area. It is now capturing more of the disastrous fires on the 1960s. A potential extension Read more
adminAuthor admin Posted on 10 March 2026 Category ScottishInfrastructure Tags Wikidata

Safe labelling

Returning to a previous topic (here and here) about how to use a language without having one's mistakes consumed and regurgitated by LLM crawlers, a way ahead may be to focus on the Gaidhlig news Read more
adminAuthor admin Posted on 14 December 2025 Category ScottishCulture Tags Gaidhlig Wikidata

Monuments

I celebrated the extra hour from the clock change by enhancing Wikidata for Scottish scheduled monuments which have a Wikipedia article but no linked image. I used a Petscan query based on the Read more
adminAuthor admin Posted on 26 October 2025 Category ScottishHistory Tags Wikidata Petscan Wikishootme WikimediaCommons

Fountains and mercat crosses

Adapting a previous Commons query, I added another option to the Scottish Lost Places bot, so that it can now present a civic artefact: a fountain or a mercat cross. It does occur to me that a Read more
adminAuthor admin Posted on 06 September 2025 Category Uncategorized Tags Mastodon Wikidata

Filling empty Wikidata item

The Petscan described here helped diminish the Scotland-related Wikidata items without any properties down to a manageable size. Taking the category query down to a depth of 4 resulted in a Read more
adminAuthor admin Posted on 17 August 2025 Category ScottishCulture Tags Wikidata Petscan

Merry-go-round

From time to time, I have noticed that Wikidata records for Scottish Football teams are often wildly out of date about the manager. Sometimes an item's P286 property has only the name of someone who Read more
adminAuthor admin Posted on 07 July 2025 Category ScottishHistory Tags Wikidata Wikipedia

Local museums

Local museums
The Easter weekend is when some volunteer-run local museums in Scotland open for the summer, so I generated a map to see which are on Wikidata This is a clickable map of local and specialist museums Read more
adminAuthor admin Posted on 23 April 2025 Category ScottishCulture Tags Wikidata

Art spaces

After adding Glasgow Sculpture Studio to Wikidata I began looking at the extent to which it contains data items on other arts initiatives in Scotland. The map view is useful for seeing and fixing Read more
adminAuthor admin Posted on 15 April 2025 Category ScottishCulture Tags Wikidata

Filling the gaps

Using Petscan to look for Scotland-related Wikidata items which lack any properties (query link) gave a large number of cases. These were alleviated using Quickstatements to add basic properties: Read more
adminAuthor admin Posted on 07 March 2025 Category ScottishHistory Tags Wikidata Petscan Quickstatements
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About

This blog provides Wikidata and SPARQL views of aspects of Scottish history and culture. These have usually been previously posted to Mastodon (through which comments are welcome).
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  • Tracing epidemics
  • Memory loss
  • Detriment to the built environment
  • Neeps and tatties
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