What is a wikipedia gadget?
Thinking of ways to show the possibilities of linked data, we have made a Wikipedia gadget, making use of a great resource the Wikimedia developers give to the community.
Wikipedia gadgets are small pieces of code you can add to your Wikipedia user templates, and allow you to add more functionality and render more information when you browse wikipedia pages.
In our case, we wanted to retrieve information from our bibliographica site to render in Wikipedia, and so as the pages are rendered with specific markup we can use the ISBN numbers present on the wikipedia articles to make consults to the bibliographica database, in a way similar to what Mark has done with the Edinburgh International Science Festival.
Bibliographica.org offers an isbn search endpoint at http://bibliographica.org/isbn/
[{"issued": "1981-01-01T00:00:00Z", "publisher": {"name": "Hamilton"}, "uri": "http://bnb.bibliographica.org/entry/GB8102507", "contributors": [{"name": "Boyd, William, 1952-"}], "title": "A good man in Africa"}]
I can use this information to make a window pop up with more information about works when we hover their ISBNs on the Wikipedia pages. If my user templates has the bibliographica gadget, every time I open a wiki page the script will ask information about all the ISBNs the page has to our database.
If something is found, it will render a frame around the ISBN numbers:
And if I hover over them, I see a window with information about the book:
Get the widget
So, if you want to have this widget, first you need to create an account in the wikipedia, and then change your default template to add the JavaScript snippet. Once you do this (instructions here ) you will be able to get the information available in bibliographica about the books.
Next steps
By now, the interaction goes in just one direction. Later on, we will be able to feed that information back to Bibliographica.
