Diarycast - Year In Review (2023) - The rollercoaster thrills and spills of 2023 at EOU Towers... #podcast #yearInReview - https://www.earth.org.uk/diarycast-20240128.html

Diarycast - Year In Review (2023) - The rollercoaster thrills and spills of 2023 at EOU Towers... #podcast #yearInReview - https://www.earth.org.uk/diarycast-20240128.html
Diarycast - Year In Review (2024) - The 2024 EOU diary, including finally ditching fossil gas... #yearInReview #heatPump - https://www.earth.org.uk/diarycast-20250509.html
Diarycast - Year In Review (2024) - The 2024 EOU diary, including finally ditching fossil gas... #yearInReview #heatPump - https://www.earth.org.uk/diarycast-20250509.html
Diarycast - Year In Review (2024) - The 2024 EOU diary, including finally ditching fossil gas... #yearInReview #heatPump - https://www.earth.org.uk/diarycast-20250509.html
Diarycast - Year In Review (2024) - The 2024 EOU diary, including finally ditching fossil gas... #yearInReview #heatPump - https://www.earth.org.uk/diarycast-20250509.html
Wikidata and the sum of all video games − 2024 edition
It’s that time of the year! After the 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022 and 2023 recaps, let’s cover what happened in 2024 with Wikidata’s WikiProject Video games. If you are not familiar with that endeavour, I will refer you to the mushroom-rambling blog-post I wrote in September 2019.
Overview
Mid-year, we passed the major milestone of 100,000 video game (Q7889) − exactly two years after hitting 50,000. As of February 1st 2024, we stand at 110K − a 12,5% growth (12,3K items) over the year.
As always, let’s have a look on how well these items are described (using, as always, integraality dashboards). The numbers are not great compared to last year− neither in absolute, nor in proportion:
The trend is somewhat expected for country and genre, but is more concerning for platform and publication date: it means that even for the most basic properties, we have not been able to keep up with the additions. However, after digging further into it, this seems mostly accounted for by a handful of batch-creation − one of ~3500 items with only a handful of statements, another one of ~140 basically empty items.
Video games per genreVideo games per country of originVideo games per platformVideo games per yearRegarding external identifiers, the number I have been tracking is the count of items without any identifier property maintained by WikiProject (P6104): WikiProject Video games (Q8485882) − excluding properties which use Wikidata itself, like vglist (P8351). The QLever query I used last year now returns 2,329 (2,1%) − but that did not exclude GamerProfiles (P12001), also sourced from Wikidata. The new, actual figure is thus 2,554 (2,3%), which is still on a good trend. Let’s keep it up!
External identifiers
New additions
We have now reached 533 video-game related external identifiers − compared to 462 external last year, so 70 more identifiers − and this year, it’s mostly not me, as I only proposed 2 properties − thanks to Matthias M., Lewis Hulbert, Trade and Kirilloparma for leading the charge here!
The additions are not very diverse language-wise this year, with a lot of English ; but also quite a few in German (PCGames.de product ID (P13165) or Atarimuseum ID (P12743)), Russian (KupiGolos game ID (P12580)) and one French (Génération Nintendo game ID (P12626)).
These new identifiers specialize in various ways:
That’s for games; but we also have new identifiers covering other entity types:
We continued making new Mix’n’match catalogues, which we use to align an external database with Wikidata: companies (26→39), genres (14→21), platforms (24→27), series (13→16), sources (7→11) and the default/misc/games (263→301). Overall, that adds up to 423 catalogs (+19%, 68 catalogs).
Highlight 1: Wikis
It was a highlight last year, and also this year. A specialized wiki with DOS Game Modding Wiki article ID (P12960), many (independent) wikis dedicated to particular series/franchises (Doom Wiki ID (P12547), Portal Wiki ID (P12543), Sonic Retro ID (P12664)…), one wiki-network (Weird Gloop article ID (P12473)) and one emulator compatibility wiki (Cemu Wiki article ID (P12625))
Highlight 2: Assets
The VG Resource is a network of websites “dedicated to the collection, archival, and appreciation of materials from video games” − with separate websites for different asset types. We now have properties for several of these: The Spriters Resource game ID (P12624), The Models Resource entity ID (P12373), and The Sounds Resource game ID (P12698).
Highlight 3: Discontinued databases
I mentioned several times before how I believe in creating Wikidata properties for discontinued databases − well we had 3 this year: TheLegacy game ID (P12709) and TheLegacy company ID (P12734) from TheLegacy.de (gone in 2018, thanks Matthias for proposing them) and AllGame style ID (P12810) from AllGame.com (defunct in 2014).
Overview
Looking at which identifiers are used the most, IGDB game ID (P5794) continues to stand proudly at the top, being now present on 74% of our Q7889 items. Lutris game ID (P7597) follows with 59,6% (makes sense, as the Lutris database is seeded with IGDB). Steam application ID (P1733) completes the podium with 57,2%.
New-entrants IsThereAnyDeal ID (P12570) and SteamGridDB ID (P12561) shoot straight to the top-five with 56,2% and 52,4%, respectively. RAWG game ID (P9968) and MobyGames game ID (P11688) are just after at ~50%. The 1/3rd area follows with HowLongToBeat ID (P2816) and PCGamingWiki ID (P6337) (both 36%), and Giant Bomb ID (P5247) (31%)
Count of video games per identifierData model
New properties
We gained two new properties for video game staff: creative director (P12617) and game designer (P12969). Neither is used much at the moment − the latter in particular could use a concerted action to move away from designed by (P287).
Modelling discussions and decisions
Throughout the year, we had on the project talk page some data modelling discussions, which in some cases led to some decisions and changes.
We successfully refined some of our instance of (P31), deprecating video game remaster and video game remake (moved to based on (P144)), as well as free and open-source video game and fan game (moved to has characteristic (P1552)).
We discussed business model (P7936), and decided to move crowdfunding (Q348303) to funding scheme (P6195) and Steam Greenlight (Q61905393) to approved by (P790).
Some discussions have not (yet) led to an action: we debated moving away from author (P50) in favour of the unfortunately labelled screenwriter (P58) instead ; and had long discussions on the current use of distributed by (P750) for online stores (eg Steam or GOG).
Technical support
Imports
In previous year-in-reviews, I have often celebrated data imports. This year is a bit different, as I have noticed 3 imports that have left things somewhat for the worse: only a handful of statements added (so little that it’s visible in the global numbers), lots of duplicates… There’s also borderline notability: one import was based on itch.io (Q22905933), and another one on the Flashpoint database (Q120096663) − literally the two examples I had used a few months earlier when saying that we perhaps do not need such bulk imports.
I am not linking to these batches because I’m sure the authors were well-intentioned, and I don’t want to throw them under the bus. But I think we need, as a project, to come up with ideas and strategies to better accompany imports.
Also, the two aforementioned batches were done as part of a datathon supported by a Wikimedia organization. I am not against such projects (I myself have helped organized some, like the 2022 DACH Culture Contest), but it does raise questions of the kind of incentives we are setting. And whether, ultimately, we are helping the regular domain editors or just giving them more work. (None of that is particularly new, as it has come back here and there in years of Wiki Loves Monuments.)
Automated data enrichment
Browsing through Facenapalm’s WikidataBot repository, many more scripts were added: match SteamGridDB ID (P12561) (a contribution by Lewis Hulbert), IsThereAnyDeal ID (P12570) and VGTimes ID (P10453) based on Steam, match PlayGround.ru ID (P10354) based on Epic Games store & PlayStation Store
Matthias M. also continued developing in his wikidata-scripts repository, with too many new features to list:
Genres
The highlight of the year, to me, was our work on video game genres.
We created 7 new external identifiers: AllGame style ID (P12810), GameFAQs genre ID (P12947), VideoGameGeek genre ID (P12957), GameSpot genre ID (P12958), Steam tag ID (P13084), GamersGlobal genre ID (P13120), Play:Right genre ID (P13199). We expanded RetroAchievements ID (P11393) and PCGamingWiki ID (P6337) to also include both of their highly detailed genre ontology. As mentioned earlier, we added 7 Mix’n’match catalogues for genres.
I’m also happy that we are bringing some multilingual perspective: out of these seven new properties, we have one in German and one in Danish ; and two of the new Mix’n’match catalogues are in Czech (Databáze her and VisionGame.cz).
Technically-wise Facenapalm imported genres from PCGamingWiki ID (P6337) for some 4-5k items (example) ; I updated my ExLudo user-script to display subgenres on genre pages (example).
According to Solidest’s new “Genres by external identifier” dashboard, we went from 324 to 394 video game genre (Q659563), and from 38 to 58 video game theme (Q42907216). There’s also some usage to it: according to this “by genre” integraality dashboard, the count of values used as genre on at least 5 video games went from 318 to 360. And that’s after some clean-up, such as moving dōjin game (Q906556) and indie game (Q2762504) to has characteristic (P1552).
Here is a SPARQL query for these new genres − for example action roguelike (Q125693245) or arena fighter (Q130270654), management simulation game (Q124695018) or horde shooter (Q129695809), the split of 2D fighting game (Q127602751) & 3D fighting game (Q130270628)… Some was Wikipedia-driven, following the creation of articles (eg cozy game (Q124973056)) or categories (physics puzzle video game (Q130404370)). Not all of these are used anywhere (yet) though, so some work to do there.
Three years ago, I was fondly remembering the days of collaboration of the month/quarter on French Wikipedia, feeling that there were little focused collaboration for video games on Wikidata. But this time it did feel to me like a wide collaborative effort, with various people contributing in different ways (research, item creation, edits, dashboard-making, automation coding…) on the same topic.
External reuse
My usual Google Scholar search on Wikidata + Video games returned something interesting: Observing the Coming of Age of Video Game Graphics (Q133294477). Adrian Demleitner (whom you may remember from last year) built a dataset of >100K screenshots (of games published between 1960–1990) from MobyGames, and analysed it using computational methods. On the method of building the dataset, Adrian explains:
While browsing [MobyGames] is free of charge, some advanced features, such as exporting search results as structured data files or API access, are only available to paying members. Further, the API imposes rate limits and does not allow filtering by date of publication. To circumvent these issues, I instead queried Wikidata for video games with a MobyGames ID […] Although taking the route via Wikidata enabled easier access to the screenshots and profiting from Wikidata’s metadata, it also limited the number of video games in the dataset. Whereas MobyGames returned roughly 22’200 video games for the chosen timespan, Wikidata only little over 4300, amounting to only a fifth of what would be available.
I am delighted to see such a reuse. It vindicates our approach of linking together databases, and more generally, this idea of distributed data − no database has all the answers, and some questions require a collaboration of several databases − and of Wikidata as the entry-point. At the same time, it shows our limits: having to truncate the dataset to a fifth of what it could have been highlights how far we still have to go in terms of breath of coverage.
The road ahead
This year-in-review is again published in March, booo ;-þ. While I keep accumulating unfinished drafts, I did celebrate last June our 100,000 item milestone ; and in October I published my SNAIL manifesto for “small data, slow data”, of which I am quite proud of.
I hoped so last year, and it did come to pass: as detailed above, we did have more discussions − and some decisions − on some finer data modelling points, whether on the project’s talk page (see our project’s log for a decision record) or our Telegram group. That was great, let’s have more of that!
I had some plans to prepare the conversation for modelling things like art styles, perspective, camera… Inspired by Abigail Chapman’s paper “Trials of Metadata: Emerging Schemas for Videogame Cataloguing” (Q117071360), I have been working on a vocabulary crosswalk from various databases, which I never finished (here’s the raw data, if that interests you) ; meanwhile Glitchwave has published this year their “Descriptors” ontology, a great input for that discussion. Now that we are done with genres and themes (sure, totally ⸮), that sounds like a great 2025 project!
Would you like to join us?
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Since we were asked we are releasing our detailed finances for 2024 in our year review:
https://fediverse.foundation/en/blog/fediverse-foundation-2024/
We at the say thanks for a great and productive year and are looking forward to many more to come.
Btw, if you want to see only our English language posts in your Mastodon* timeline, you can follow us, click the 3-dots-menu on our profile and click "change subscribed language".
*some other parts of the Fediverse might have that feature too.
Draft2Digital’s 2024 Year in Review https://www.draft2digital.com/blog/draft2digitals-2024-year-in-review/ #indiepublishing #self-publishing #indieadvantage #draft2digital #YearinReview #indieauthor #Smashwords #marketing #Merger
With 2024 now behind us, we wanted to take a moment to reflect on the growth and achievements we accomplished as a community last year, and celebrate the incredible support we received from the FOSS community throughout the journey. #FDroid #yearinreview #2024inreview #foss #Android
https://f-droid.org/2025/01/21/a-look-back-at-2024-f-droids-progress-and-whats-coming-in-2025.html
My Seek 2024 Year in Review:
* 141 new species observed, of those, the top three kinds:
* 79 plants
* 20 insects
* 16 fungi
* 56 challenge badges earned
June was the month I observed the most new species in 2024, followed by March, and then July.
Seek also gave me a graph of observations per month, and also a map of where I made my discoveries.
Rather than posting screenshots of the Year in Review that Seek provided me in the app, I am posting the relevant content here in a post on my personal site, which I know I’ll be able to search and look up in the future.
Seek is a delightful free (like actually free, free of tracking, free of surveillance) native mobile application for identifying species.
Made by the iNaturalist folks (https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/seek_app), Seek works without creating an account, and is able to work completely offline to identify species out in the wild (and add them to your local collection).
Seek awards you Species Badges when you discover a number of species of a particular grouping, as well as Challenge Badges when you complete one or more of their monthly challenges that they post.
In some ways it’s like Pokemon Go, except based on finding and collecting observations of real living things.
I have found it quite useful especially when traveling, and wondering is that plant (or animal) the same as one I’ve seen elsewhere, perhaps around home, or is it a slightly different species?
I also really like the good example that Seek provides for how an app can be immediately useful without requiring extra labor (like creating an account, or logging on) on behalf of the person using it.
Lastly, Seek is an excellent example of a truly offline capable app where nearly all of its functionality works just fine without a network connection.
Both of these capabilities (offline first, no login wall) are what we should aspire to when we build #indieweb apps or websites for ourselves and our friends.
This is post 8 of #100PostsOfIndieWeb. #100Posts #yearInReview #iNaturalist #SeekApp
← https://tantek.com/2025/012/t1/eight-years-webmention
→ https://tantek.com/2025/055/t1/three-steps-indieweb-cybersecurity
Glossary:
login wall
https://indieweb.org/login_wall
offline first
https://indieweb.org/offline_first
My #GoogleLocalGuide year in review. If you're a Google Local guide focused on vegan food, hotels, and traveling, follow me at https://shorturl.at/F8kka
Let the trend die. A #YearInReview for my spam call blocking app???
So I looked at it. It’s basically a #Verizon ad. It’s all about how many calls they blocked overall, not about how many they blocked *for me*.
Every person would get an identical review. It’s totally worthless.
It has a thing for you to tap to see your statistics which just takes you to the standard screen in the app that shows what it’s done in the last 60 days.
My ECHO 2024 wrap is here!
Proud to reflect on the milestones, connections, and impact achieved in 2024.
Inspired to do even more in 2025!
Check out my 2024 @ProjectECHO journey: https://iecho.org/wrap-2024?orgId=&userId=USR1726328732897C5CX6GTHXJ #iECHO #YearInReview #ProjectECHO #AllTeachAllLearn
𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝘆𝗲𝗮𝗿 𝘁𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗺𝗮𝗱𝗲 𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝗖𝗘𝗢 𝗮𝗻 𝗜𝗻𝗳𝗹𝘂𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗶𝗮𝗹 𝗘𝗦𝗚 𝗟𝗲𝗮𝗱𝗲𝗿, 𝗧𝗼𝗽 𝗔𝗜 𝗟𝗲𝗮𝗱𝗲𝗿 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗧𝗵𝗿𝗲𝗲-𝘁𝗶𝗺𝗲 𝗧𝗼𝗽 𝗪𝗼𝗺𝗲𝗻 𝗟𝗲𝗮𝗱𝗲𝗿 𝗶𝗻 𝗧𝗲𝗰𝗵 𝗔𝘄𝗮𝗿𝗱𝘀 𝗪𝗶𝗻𝗻𝗲𝗿
or: Riess Consulting & Tech Year in Review
Victoria Riess, 𝘀𝗵𝗮𝗽𝗲𝗱 𝗳𝘂𝘁𝘂𝗿𝗲 of broader economy and society
𝗢𝘂𝗿 𝗖𝗜𝗢 𝘄𝗮𝘀 𝗮𝘁 𝗳𝗼𝗿𝗲𝗳𝗿𝗼𝗻𝘁 of adoption of advanced technologies such as AI
𝗢𝘂𝗿 𝗖𝗘𝗢 𝗮𝗱𝗼𝗽𝘁𝗲𝗱 𝗶𝗻𝗻𝗼𝘃𝗮𝘁𝗶𝘃𝗲 𝘀𝘁𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗲𝗴𝗶𝗲𝘀 to attract and retain top talent
𝗩𝗶𝗰𝘁𝗼𝗿𝗶𝗮 𝗥𝗶𝗲𝘀𝘀 𝘄𝗮𝘀 𝗳𝗼𝗰𝘂𝘀𝗲𝗱 𝗼𝗻 𝗰𝗿𝗲𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗻𝗴 a positive corporate culture
victoriariess.de
A new video is now live on my YouTube channel here: https://youtu.be/OpHJluwK57Q
What's in it? A personal review of the first 11 months of my YouTube channel and the 25 videos I managed to publish in 2024.
An assessment of my success by reference to YouTube's analytics.
A broad-brush picture of where I'm hoping to take the channel in 2025.
New Year's Greetings to all.
#video #yearinreview #2024inreview #yearahead
Here's my playlist of the best new Christian Music I've found in 2024.
The music spans a number of genres but I've tried to put the songs into an order where the flow of listening to them makes sense. If there's something you're not digging just skip on to the next, it might be totally different.
*Note that these weren't all released in 2024, it's just the year I discovered them.
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/2vvjfBliHiIsm7lkwQhHJY
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLOUxvzOyLN_bhq88nMZUpNKSFktSvyiw-
Here's my playlist of the best new Pop Music I've found in 2024.
The music spans a number of genres but I've tried to put the songs into an order where the flow of listening to them makes sense. If there's something you're not digging just skip on to the next, it might be totally different.
*Note that these weren't all released in 2024, it's just the year I discovered them.
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/11GnM6QAcemiuEaIrqA3BO
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLOUxvzOyLN_aeTy6DQdKNfu2jrmtQrsOY