Deleting statements and references from a wikibase
Any statement or reference in a wikibase can easily be deleted using the graphical interface. But what if you have several or even hundreds of deletions that you need to make? Perhaps your accidentally used the wrong data source for many statements or the URL of source information has changed for many references. In those sorts of situations, it is impractical to make the deletions manually.
The MediaWiki API provides two modules for making deletions in wikibases: wbremoveclaims for removing statements (also known as “claims”) and wbremovereferences for removing references. In both cases, the identifiers for the information to be deleted must be known. (See this for more on statement identifiers and this for more on reference identifiers.)
Those identifiers aren’t typically known if the statements or references were added using the graphical interface. However, if the VanderBot script was used to load data into a wikibase, those identifiers are captured and saved in the source data CSV. In this tutorial, we’ll see how to use a Python script called VanderDeleteBot to use this saved information to make multiple deletions.
Before you can use this script, you need to have credentials for the wikibase in which you want to make the deletions. For more information about this, see the section on setting up a bot password in the page about loading data into a wikibase.
Identifiers
The screenshot above shows part of a CSV that was used to load information about elements into a wikibase. The abbreviation column contains the information that I used to create the abbreviation statement visible in the graphical interface:
The abbreviation_uuid column contains the unique UUID identifiers for each of the statements. The abbreviation_ref1_hash column contains the hash identifiers generated from the references. Notice that all of the references that contain the same reference URL and retrieved date information have the same identifier.
Deleting statements
Let’s imagine that IUPAC has assigned names and abbreviations to the last six elements in the row and I want to delete the abbreviations so that I can upload new ones. I need to provide the VanderDeleteBot script with the list of statement UUIDs and their corresponding Q IDs. The easiest way to do this is to just make a copy of the CSV used when VanderBot created the items and call file deletions.csv, then delete all of the rows except for the ones containing the statements I want to delete.
The column containing the UUIDs for the statements to be deleted is called abbreviation_uuid.
To perform the deletions, download the script. Go to its GitHub page, then right-click on the raw button and select Save Link As.... Save the script in the directory where the deletions.csv file is located.
Open a terminal window and navigate to the directory where you saved the script and CSV. Assuming that you used the defaults for naming and saving your credentials file, you can run the script by issuing the following command:
python vanderdeletebot.py -N abbreviation_uuid
where abbreviation_uuid is the name of the column containing the UUID identifiers for the statements you want to delete. (In some instalations it is necessary to use python3 instead of python in the command.)
The script has a default delay of 1.25 seconds between API calls to stay under the rate limit of the Wikidata API. However, if you are writing to your wikibase, there is no rate limit. So you can set the delay to zero seconds by setting the -A option:
python vanderdeletebot.py -A 0 -N abbreviation_uuid
After the script runs, if I refresh the item page, I can see that the abbreviation claim is gone.
The script doesn’t automatically change anything in any CSV file, so you will probably want to delete the information about those statements and their associated references from the original spreadsheet:
Deleting references
The process for deleting references is similar to that of deleting statements. Let’s imagine that you want to replace some references because the URL for the existing discovery date references were broken and you want to upload new ones.
The screenshot above shows the graphical interface with the reference we want to delete.
In the table above, you can see the column that contains the identifier for the references: discovery_date_ref1_hash. It denotes the reference node that is linked to two sources: the reference URL and the retrieved date. You will notice that the hash is the same for all of the references shown. That’s because the sources are exactly the same for each row. Clearly this isn’t enough information in this column alone for the API to know which reference to delete. Therefore, the API requires not only the reference hash, but also the UUID for the statement it’s associated with, plus the Q ID column. The content of these three columns specify the reference unambiguously, so all three columns must be present in the table.
The script expects you to supply the name of the reference hash column. Based on having _hash in the name, it knows that you want to delete references and it will figure out the name of the corresponding statement UUID column by looking at the descriptive first part of the column name (discovery_date in this case).
As with deleting statements, I’ll create a copy of the CSV and name it deletions.csv, then delete all rows except for the ones that contain the references I want to delete:
This time I’ll issue the command specifying the reference column:
python vanderdeletebot.py -A 0 -N discovery_date_ref1_hash
Now if I reload the page, I can see the result of the deletion:
I can see that the date of discovery statement now has zero references. As with the deletion of the statements, I should go back to my original data table and delete the section that contains information about the references I deleted:
I can then paste in the data for the new references in the discovery_date_ref1_reference_url and discovery_date_ref1_retrieved_val columns of the original spreadsheet, then run VanderBot to upload the changed references.
creating properties using a script
querying a wikibase with SPARQL
interacting with Structured Data on Commons
Revised 2023-02-11
Questions? Contact us
License: CC BY 4.0.
Credit: "Vanderbilt Libraries Digital Lab - www.library.vanderbilt.edu"