Step One:

Learning Wikidata

First, I looked for the Wikipedia page for a prominent French military surgeon who served primarily during the Napoleonic Wars: Dominique Jean Larrey. From there, I explored his Wikidata page and familirized myself with Items, Labels and statements.

Step Two:

Downloading Data

I decided that a list of coordinates would be helpful for my research, especailly if I wanted to create a map of france. I first tried to look for instances of military hospitals in France. See image one. This search was successful, but there were only ten entries and they were not filtered by date. Some entries were present-day hospitals while others were former hospitals that have now become landmarks.

Becuase this list was incomplete and not exactly what I was looking for, I thought that a list of the coordinates of all cities in France would be useful. With that in hand I could use a simple search function to find the cities that correspond to the hospital records I have. I did a search using the term cities, but this only turned up 125 results, which is far too low a number. See image two. I then realized that for metropolitan France, using the term commune would turn out better results. The search worked perfectly and now I have a list of 40421 communes in France with thier coordinates. See image three

Step Three:

Contributing to Wikidata

My contribution to the world of linked data is rather small. I decided to create a new entry. I the person Jacques DeHorne with a description of “18th century French military physician” to the wikidata universe and made three statements about him. First, that he was a military physician, second that he was a member of the Societe royale de medecine, and third that his sex was male.





















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