Computational knowledge: Wikidata, Wikidata query Service, and women who are mayors! – [[WM:TECHBLOG]]
One of the main aims of Wikidata is to represent knowledge in a way that is computable—that is, amenable to automatic processing. Wikipedia already contains a lot of information; much of it is reasonably easy for a human to understand—though some of the more esoteric bits are decidedly not—but it’s not at all readily crunchable by a computer. A question that has been near and dear to the hearts of fans of Wikidata and the Wikidata Query Service (WDQS) for many years is: What are the world’s largest cities with a woman as mayor? (No really! The Wikiquote page for Wikidata includes a quote from and a link to a 2015 mailing list message from Markus Krötzsch saying he’d been using it as an example for years. It was mentioned in a TechCrunch article all the way back in 2012 and has come up more recently in an October 2019 interview in Newfoundland Quarterly, and a February 2020 article in Wired.) It seems like a straightforward question, and, if you think about it, all of the information needed to answer it should be right there in English Wikipedia. The largest cities in the world should have articles that list their mayors, and there’s already a list of the largest cities in the world. For each city, we can just open the city’s article, see who the current mayor is, and note whether or not the mayor is a woman.
