Wikidata is a Giant Crosswalk File | Drew Breunig

Let’s build a massive crosswalk connecting map data with just Wikidata, DuckDB, some Ruby, and a hard-won bash one-linerWikidata is Wikipedia’s structuralist younger brother. It’s contents are seemingly exhaustive, but rather than readable articles, Wikidata expresses itself with structured data. Pick a subject and check out it’s page; it’s like reading the back of a baseball card for, well, anything. And burried in those stats and metadata are external IDs: identifiers from other sites and systems, which we can use to grab more data and develop cross-platform applications. Wikidata has thousands of ‘em. .