Wikidata:Property proposal/Pepys Encylopedia ID

Pepys Encylopedia ID[edit]

Originally proposed at Wikidata:Property proposal/Authority control

Done: Pepys Encylopedia ID (P9120) (Talk and documentation)

Description	Identifier for a person, place, or thing in an annotated index to the online diaries of Samuel Pepys
Data type	External identifier
Domain	item
Allowed values	\d+
Example 1	John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester (Q358912) → 5344
Example 2	John Colvill (Q104918116) → 8583
Example 3	Clerkenwell (Q124129) → 3395
Example 4	HMS Defiance (Q5632102) → 8187
Example 5	mithridate (Q15978469) → 7448
Example 6	Romeo and Juliet (Q83186) → 5445
Source	https://www.pepysdiary.com/encyclopedia/
Planned use	I hope to extract and import all the IDs that have Wikipedia links on the site, and set up a Mix'n'match catalogue for the people IDs
Number of IDs in source	5081 (2817 people)
Expected completeness	always incomplete (Q21873886)
Formatter URL	https://www.pepysdiary.com/encyclopedia/$1/
Distinct-values constraint	yes

Motivation[edit]

https://www.pepysdiary.com/ is an annotated online version of the diary of Samuel Pepys (Q106143), originally posted 'in real time' between 2003 and 2012, which attracted quite an online following, and that is still being updated and added to. (As of early 2021 the year 1668 is currently being re-lived, and live-tweeted at https://twitter.com/samuelpepys). Followers are encouraged to comment on the diary entries for each day, and in parallel an annotated index has been created of people, places, and things mentioned in the diary, where followers are also encouraged to submit their own additional material. This property is proposed to link items for people, places, and things on Wikidata to their corresponding entries in that annotated index.

The amount of information on the site for each indexed item varies. Some items (such as eg the page for John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester (Q358912)) contain content written specially for the site. Some also may contain (rather well executed) copies of the English Wikipedia article for the person or thing (see eg the 'wikipedia' tab on the page for John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester (Q358912)). Other pages, such as the page for John Colvill (Q104918116) (who does not have an article on en-wiki) may be more bare-bones, but for such pages there can be still be valuable material in the user-submitted comments.

Perhaps particularly valuable on the site, as a magnet for 'outbound' links, is the 'references' tab, which shows when Pepys wrote about each person or thing, with links to the diary entries in which they appear. The site also contains capsule descriptions for each indexed item. These appear as mouse-over pop-ups for annotated items in the diary entries, which are not displayed on the items' own pages, but they are present in the HTML, so can straightforwardly be extracted for eg Mix'n'match or OpenRefine.

For Wikidata, the site represents a useful additional destination site with information about the people or places, as well as a useful check for things that we may be missing items for. For the site, Wikidata matching may help streamline its synchronisation process with Wikipedia entries, and also give access to useful onward links (eg biography sites, museum sites, etc) for the people and places in question.

As noted above, the site contains extensive Wikipedia links, which should allow a lot of matches to be added pretty much directly. For people on the site I would additionally propose to create a mix'n'match catalogue. For places and things I would propose to work group-by-group through the classification on the encyclopedia entry page, with places probably most easily matched via their coordinates, and other items via OpenRefine. Jheald (talk) 15:51, 20 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]