User:Econterms/Demo for WikiConference North America 2020

I'm doing research on the prehistory of inventions and startup industries

Here, the invention of airplanes and the airplane industry

There's a boom in patents, scientific publications, clubs, new companies, letters between inventors, etc.

I'm digging into the details. What institutions help invention and startups?

• How many were balloons? or kites? gliders? had flapping wings? helicopters?
• Each patent, article, inventor etc has a story.
• Micro history <=> statistics <=> big history
• But! At micro level, much ambiguity, error, missing info, need to reclassify
• Wikis are good for this

• Patent GB-1913-4191.29772 -- an example patent -- this research is about finding historic patents and publications associated with aero/aviation
• Structured data -- structured table of patents, alongside a category of them; they are downloadable

This is possible using the extension called Cargo, which enables the wiki admin to create tables of this kind, in which

Then queries/reports of the following kind are possible

• Ornithopter -- list of patents classified as having flapping wings

• Rich linking to sources is helpful
• CPC B64C33/00 -- the category for ornithopters in one of the formal category systems for patents -- but there are multiple such systems

• Flight, 1911, The Problem of the Helicopter -- likewise publications -- each one can be studied and classified with our keywords
• Octave Chanute - key inventor, networker, and publisher -- note list of pages with his patents and his publications and reports

Disambiguation, reducing duplication

• Historical research ambiguities like alternate spellings or misspellings of a person's name, or whether two people are actually the same person
• Charles Bartlett Thomas -- spelling of name; Georg Wellner -- spellings of his name and ambiguities about whether he was from Brunn or Brno
• When were various terms used? Patent US-1913-1059247

Counts of patents on this wiki by country from this wiki

Here are 8 tables. Each row in a table has a wiki page.

• 17,448 Patents related to aeronautics and aviation: Wiki pages available as Structured data
• 2,337 Technology/patent categories: Wiki pages, Structured data
• 24,414 Publications: Wiki pages, Structured data
• 474 Companies: Wiki pages, Structured data
• 964 Not-for-profit organizations -- clubs, research groups, government labs: Wiki pages, Structured data
• Exhibitions, conferences, and prizes: Wiki pages, Structured data
• 2,040 People: inventors, patentees, and authors -- Structured data
• 683 Letters‏‎ and telegrams between aero experimenters -- Structured data

Some of this can go onto Wikidata in time. Crowdsourcing will help.

This wiki is for primary research. Rapid invention, flexibility, system control helps track extreme detail.

The wiki approach is good for historical studies that include data science