Wikidata lexicographic data coverage for Croatian in 2023

3 January 2024

Last year, I published ambitious goals for the coverage of lexicographic data for Croatian in Wikidata. My self-proclaimed goal was widely missed: I wanted to go from 40% coverage to 60% -- instead, thanks to the help of contributors, we reached 45%.

We grew from 3,124 forms to 4,115, i.e. almost a thousand new forms, or about 31%. The coverage grew from around 11 million tokens to about 13 million tokens in the Croatian Wikipedia, or, as said, from 40% to 45%. The covered forms grew from 1.4% to 1.9%, which illustrates neatly the increased difficulty to reach more coverage (thanks to Zipf's law): last year, we increased covered forms by 1%, which translated to an overall coverage increase of occurrences by 35%. This year, although we increased the covered forms by another 0.5%, we only got an overall coverage increase of occurrences by 5%.

But some of my energy was diverted from adding more lexicographic data to adding functions that help with adding and checking lexicographic data. We launched a new project, Wikifunctions, that can hold functions. There, we collected functions to create the regular forms for Croatian nouns. All nouns are now covered.

I think that's still a great achievement and progress. Sure, we didn't meet the 60%, but the functions helped a lot to get to the 45%, and they will continue to benefit us 2024 too. Again, I want to declare some goals, at least for myself, but not as ambitious with regards to coverage: the goal for 2024 is to reach 50% coverage of Croatian, and in addition, I would love us to have Lexeme forms available for verbs and adjectives, not only for nouns, (for verbs, Ivi404 did most of the work already), and maybe even have functions ready for adjectives.

• Changes in Croatian coverage in 2023
• List of missing forms for Croatian

Simia

---

Previous entry: Star Trek's 32nd century

Next entry: RIP Niklaus Wirth