You’re probably familiar with Wikipedia, but have you heard of Wikidata?
Wikidata is a collection of structured data that helps power Wikipedia and a variety of other Wikimedia projects. Unlike Wikipedia, which is designed for human use, Wikidata makes it easy to pull out specific data about a Wikipedia article’s topic without having to do a lot of text parsing. The various data points Wikidata maintains are called properties. You can get a list of them here.
I’ve been playing around with Wikidata for a while using more common properties like birth and death dates. That’s useful but I’ve wanted to expand my scope a bit and explore other, lesser-known properties, perhaps while focusing on a specific part of Wikipedia.
The snag is that there are almost 11,000 Wikidata properties and I had no idea where to start. I went looking for a list of the most popular Wikidata properties and found this, but it was too general to give me much guidance.
So I made Wikidata Property Peeker. Paste in a Wikipedia category and (after several seconds, because it has to make multiple API calls, I know it’s an eternity in Internet terms, but please be patient with me and my janky-ass JavaScript) WPP returns a list of the most popular Wikidata properties in a given category, like so:
You can run multiple searches and the result boxes will stack on the page. That’s deliberate so you can run multiple category searches and then eyeball them at the same time. When you’re ready to start over, just reload the page.
