Thread by @aharoni

This is a thread about three of life's greatest things: #pasta, @Wikipedia, and @Wikidata.

There are many other great things in life, but this thread is not about them.

A couple of weeks ago I celebrated a birthday in an Italian restaurant in #Haifa, and I saw a pack of pasta of a curious shape on a shelf there. I asked whether they serve it or sell it.

"No", they told me, "it's just a display".

This answer didn't satisfy me.

I added the pasta's name, Busiate, to my shopping list.

I searched for it in a bunch of stores. No luck.

I googled for it and found an Israeli importer of this pasta. But they only sell in bulk, in crates of at least 12 items. That's too much.

And of course, I searched Wikipedia, too. There's an article about Busiate in the English Wikipedia, and also in the Arabic and Japanese ones, but curiously, not in Italian and not in Sicilian.

So I did the following:

Improved the article about Busiate in the English Wikipedia: cleaned up references and formatting and updated the links to references.

I did the same to the article about Pesto alla trapanese, the sauce with which this pasta is traditionally served.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pesto_all…

I also cleaned up the Wikidata items associated with the two articles above, and translated all the relevant property names to Hebrew, and I went further:

I added references to the Wikidata item about the sauce—The Slow Food Dictionary of Italian Regional Cooking. Now, a book in Wikidata is not just a book.

You need to create an item about the book, and about the *edition* of a book. And since I created those, I create Wikidata items for the original Italian author, for the English translator, and for the publishing house.

And here's where it gets really nerdy: I added each of the sauce's ingredients as values of the "has part" property, and added the dictionary as a reference for each entry. Yeah, it's possibly overdone, but whatevs.

And since I have a soft spot for regional languages, I also added the sauce's Sicilian name under the "native label" property.

And I translated the Wikipedia article into Hebrew.

he.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D7%91%D7…

And I created the "Sicilian cuisine" category in the Hebrew Wikipedia—a surprisingly large number of articles already existed, filed under "Italian cuisine".

And ALL of this yak shaving happened before I even tasted the damn thing. If you don't know what yak shaving is, see this:
en.wiktionary.org/wiki/yak_shavi…

And maybe also this:
aharoni.wordpress.com/2016/05/21/wik…

So anyway, I couldn't find this pasta anywhere, and I couldn't by it from the importer's website, but I wanted it really badly, so I called the importer on the phone.

They told me they don't have any stores in #Jerusalem that buy from them, but they suggested checking a butcher shop in Mevaseret Tsiyon, a suburb of Jerusalem. Pasta in a butcher shop... OK.

So I took a bus to Mevaseret, and voila: I found it there!

And I made Busiate, and I made the sauce! It's delicious and totally worth the effort.

Of course, I could just eat it without editing Wikipedia and Wikidata on the way, but to me that would be boring.

Delicious.

These are the busiate with pesto alla trapanese that I made at home. I uploaded this photo to @WikiCommons and added it to the English Wikipedia article. I wonder what do Wikipedians from Sicily think of it :)