1. Talk to wikidata and retrieve information

I think wikidata is one of the coolest knowledge bases in the world, it contains facts about people, other animals, places, and the world. It powers many boxes you see in Wikipedia pages. For instance this random page about Charles the first has a box on the right that says something about his ancestors, successors and coronation. The same information can be displayed in Dutch. This is very cool and saves Wikipedia a lot of work. However, we can also use it!

You can create your own query about the world in the query editor. But it is quite hard to figure out how to do that. These queries need to made in a specific way. I just used an example from wikidata: ‘who’s birthday is it today?’ and modified it to search for people’s death (that’s how I learn, modify something and see if I broke it). It looks a lot like SQL, but is slightly different.

Of course this editor is nice for us humans, but we want the computer to do it so we can send a query to wikidata. I was extremely lazy and used the WikidataQueryServiceR created by wiki-guru Mikhail Popov [@bearlogo](https://twitter.com/bearloga).

This is the query I ended up using (It looks very much like the birthdays one but with added information):

querystring <- 
'SELECT # what variables do you want to return (defined later on)
  ?entityLabel (YEAR(?date) AS ?year) 
  ?cause_of_deathLabel 
  ?place_of_deathLabel 
  ?manner_of_deathLabel  
  ?country_of_citizenshipLabel 
  ?country_of_birth
  ?date_of_birth
WHERE {
  BIND(MONTH(NOW()) AS ?nowMonth) # this is a very cool trick
  BIND(DAY(NOW()) AS ?nowDay)
  ?entity wdt:P570 ?date.
  SERVICE wikibase:label { bd:serviceParam wikibase:language "en". }
  ?entity wdt:P509 ?cause_of_death.
  OPTIONAL { ?entity wdt:P20 ?place_of_death. }
  OPTIONAL { ?entity wdt:P1196 ?manner_of_death. }
  FILTER(((MONTH(?date)) = ?nowMonth) && ((DAY(?date)) = ?nowDay))
  OPTIONAL { ?entity wdt:P27 ?country_of_citizenship. }
  OPTIONAL { ?entity wdt:p19 ?country_of_birth}
  OPTIONAL { ?entity wdt:P569 ?date_of_birth.}
}
LIMIT 10'

Try this in the query editor

When I created this blog post (every day the result will be different) the result looked like this:

library(WikidataQueryServiceR)
result <- query_wikidata(querystring)
## 10 rows were returned by WDQS
result[1:3,1:3]# first 3 rows, first 3 columsn
##                  entityLabel year cause_of_deathLabel
## 1 Rafael García-Plata y Osma 1918           influenza
## 2        Dobroslava Menclová 1978       traffic crash
## 3             Alan J. Pakula 1998       traffic crash

The query returns name, year, cause of death, manner of death (didn’t know which one to use), place of death, country of citizenship, country of birth and date of birth. I can now glue all these parts together to create a sentence of sorts

2. grab one of the deaths and create a sentence

I will use glue to make text, but the paste functions from base R is also fine.

These are the first lines for instance:

library(glue)
glue_data(result[1:2,], "Today in {year} in the place {place_of_deathLabel} died {entityLabel} with cause: {cause_of_deathLabel}. {entityLabel} was born on {as.Date(date_of_birth, '%Y-%m-%d')}. Find more info on this cause of death on www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/{cause_of_deathLabel}.  #wikidata")
## Today in 1918 in the place Cáceres died Rafael García-Plata y Osma with cause: influenza. Rafael García-Plata y Osma was born on 1870-03-04. Find more info on this cause of death on www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/influenza.  #wikidata
## Today in 1978 in the place Plzeň died Dobroslava Menclová with cause: traffic crash. Dobroslava Menclová was born on 1904-01-02. Find more info on this cause of death on www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/traffic crash.  #wikidata

Post that sentence to twitter in the account wikidatabot

I created the twitter account wikidatabot and added pictures 2fa and some bio information. I wanted to make it clear that it was a bot. To post something on your behalf on twitter requires a developers account. Go to https://developer.twitter.com and create that account. In my case I had to manually verify twice because apparently everything I did screamed bot activity to twitter (they were not entirely wrong). You have to sign some boxes, acknowledge the code of conduct and understand twitter’s terms.

The next step is to create a twitter app but I will leave that explanation to rtweet, because that vignette is very very helpful.

When you’re done, you can post to twitter on your account with the help of a consumer key, access key, consumer token and access token. You will need them all and you will have to keep them a secret (or other people can post on your account, and that is something you really don’t want).

With those secrets and the rtweet package you can create a token that enables you to post to twitter.

And it is seriously as easy as:

rtweet::post_tweet(status = tweettext, token = token )

Again the same tweet

4 Throw it all into a docker container

I want to post this every day but to make it run in the cloud it would be nice if R and the code would be nicely packed together. That is where docker comes in, you can define what packages you want and a mini operating system is created that will run for everyone on ever computer (if they have docker). The whole example script and docker file can be found here on github.

And that’s it. If you have suggestions on how to run it every day in the cloud for cheap, let me know by twitter or by opening an issue on github.

sessioninfo::session_info()
## ─ Session info ──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
##  setting  value                       
##  version  R version 3.5.1 (2018-07-02)
##  os       Ubuntu 16.04.5 LTS          
##  system   x86_64, linux-gnu           
##  ui       X11                         
##  language en_US                       
##  collate  en_US.UTF-8                 
##  tz       Europe/Amsterdam            
##  date     2018-11-19                  
## 
## ─ Packages ──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
##  package               * version date       source         
##  backports               1.1.2   2017-12-13 CRAN (R 3.5.0) 
##  blogdown                0.8     2018-07-15 CRAN (R 3.5.1) 
##  bookdown                0.7     2018-02-18 CRAN (R 3.5.0) 
##  clisymbols              1.2.0   2017-05-21 CRAN (R 3.5.0) 
##  crayon                  1.3.4   2017-09-16 CRAN (R 3.5.0) 
##  curl                    3.2     2018-03-28 CRAN (R 3.5.0) 
##  digest                  0.6.15  2018-01-28 CRAN (R 3.5.0) 
##  evaluate                0.11    2018-07-17 CRAN (R 3.5.1) 
##  glue                  * 1.3.0   2018-07-17 CRAN (R 3.5.1) 
##  htmltools               0.3.6   2017-04-28 CRAN (R 3.5.0) 
##  httr                    1.3.1   2017-08-20 CRAN (R 3.5.0) 
##  knitr                   1.20    2018-02-20 CRAN (R 3.5.0) 
##  magrittr                1.5     2014-11-22 CRAN (R 3.5.0) 
##  R6                      2.2.2   2017-06-17 CRAN (R 3.5.0) 
##  Rcpp                    0.12.18 2018-07-23 cran (@0.12.18)
##  rmarkdown               1.10    2018-06-11 CRAN (R 3.5.0) 
##  rprojroot               1.3-2   2018-01-03 CRAN (R 3.5.0) 
##  sessioninfo             1.0.0   2017-06-21 CRAN (R 3.5.1) 
##  stringi                 1.2.4   2018-07-20 cran (@1.2.4)  
##  stringr                 1.3.1   2018-05-10 CRAN (R 3.5.0) 
##  WikidataQueryServiceR * 0.1.1   2017-04-28 CRAN (R 3.5.1) 
##  withr                   2.1.2   2018-03-15 CRAN (R 3.5.0) 
##  xfun                    0.3     2018-07-06 CRAN (R 3.5.1) 
##  yaml                    2.2.0   2018-07-25 CRAN (R 3.5.1)