Skip to content

Judgement Day

Wikipedia label by Gmhofmann on Commons

At the dawn of Wikidata, I wrote a tool called “Terminator”. Not just because I wanted to have one of my own, but as a pun on the term “term”, used in the database table name (“wb_term”) where Wikidata labels, descriptions, and aliases are stored. The purpose of the tool is to find important (by some definition) Wikidata items that lack a label in a specific language. This can be very powerful, especially in languages with low Wikidata participation; setting the label for teacher (Q37226) in a language will immediately allow all Wikidata items using that item (as an occupation, perhaps) to show that label. A single edit can improve hundreds or thousands of items, and make them more accessible in that language.

Well, Wikidata has grown a lot since I started that tool, and the Terminator didn’t cope well with the growth; it was limited to a handful of languages, and the daily update was compute intensive. Plus, the interface was slow and ugly. Time for a rewrite!

So without further ado, I present version 2 of the Terminator tool. Highlights:

  • Now covers all Wikidata languages
  • Get the top items with missing labels, descriptions, or Wikipedia articles
  • Sort items by total number of claims, external IDs, sitelinks, or a compound score
  • The database currently contains the top (by compound score) ~4.1 million items on Wikidata
  • Updated every 10 minutes
  • Search for missing labels in multiple languages (e.g. German, Italian, or Welsh)
  • Only show items that have labels in languages you know
  • Automatically hides “untranslatable” items (scientific articles, humans, Wikipedia-related pages such as templates and categories), unless you want those as well
  • Can use a SPARQL query to filter items (only shows items that match all the above, plus are in the SPARQL result, for results with <10K items or so)
  • Game mode (single, unsorted random result, more details, re-flows on mobile)

Please let me know through the usual channels about bugs and feature requests. I have dropped some functionality from the old version, such as data download; but that version is still linked form the new main page. Enjoy!

One Comment