Wikidata for Open Innovation in Libraries, Industry, and Communities

Abstract

Wikidata is an open, multilingual structured knowledge base that can be read and edited by both humans and machines and is made by people like you. Digital assistants like Siri and Alexa use Wikidata, as do search engines like Google. You can think of Wikidata as a database of databases, linking items through identifiers. This creates a centralized location of information about anything and everything: from the universe to the pika, love and the Chicago-style hot dog. With over 114,683,910 data items, there’s likely to be an item for your favorite band, and your birthplace. In this workshop, participants will gain hands-on editing experience following an introduction to Wikidata, live demo and overview of its impact across domains: in libraries, research, museums, industry, and open knowledge communities.

1 Target audience and learning objectives

This workshop aims to provide a deep dive into Wikidata, its ontology, and its uses across domains while providing time for hands-on practice editing Wikidata while tracking contributions with a Wikimedia Outreach Dashboard. Participants will reflect on the state of the global data commons, leave with a better understanding of Wikidata’s bibliographic domain and its complexities, as well as prototype projects aimed to make use of Wikidata’s bibliographic entities to reconcile and generate new BIBFRAME entities.

2 Format

This workshop will take place over two hours, with one hour set aside for a presentation on Wikidata and one hour dedicated to editing Wikidata. The workshop follows Wikimedia best practices for Wikidata Edit-a-thons and serves as a model for other participants to lead their own Wikidata editing sessions.

3 Workshop Outline

1. Reflections on the global data commons
2. Wikidata overview and background
3. Wikidata in the Wikimedia Ecosystem
4. The Wikidata Ontology
5. Wikidata in the Commercial Sector
6. The Wikidata Ontology’s Bibliographic Domain
7. Realigning Wikidata’s Bibliographic Domain with Library Bibliographic Conceptual Models
8. Overview of the MARC2Wiki2BF Prototype
9. Stanford University Libraries and the PCC EMCO Program
10. Overview of Wikidata Tools and Editing
11. Structure of Wikidata Items
12. Adding statements, references, and qualifiers to Wikidata items
13. Wikidata Query Service
14. Edit-a-thon focusing on buildings located in Seoul

4 Presenter biography