Starting in August and running through December, 2023, we will be assembling a data set of diverse LIS (Library and Information Science) materials (articles, conference proceedings, books) and adding it to Wikidata during a series of Wikidata Working Hours. Each event will provide an opportunity to try out different Wikidata-related skills and tools while working with a finite dataset. Topics covered in the Working Hours will include: assembling a bibliography, exporting articles and books from Zotero into QuickStatements, webscraping for data in the PAWS environment, adding authors and publishers manually into Wikidata, batch editing using OpenRefine, batch editing using the LINCS tool, using the Author Disambiguator tool, and analyzing and visualizing data with SPARQL and Scholia.
The second Wikidata Working Hour in the series will cover adding the articles from our bibliography of diverse LIS resources that we created in our 1st session to Wikidata! We will learn how to use Zotero, the reference management software, and its browser plugin to automatically extract metadata for articles and convert them to a Wikidata format that can be batch uploaded using QuickStatements.
The ethos of the Working Hour series centres around citation politics and the environmental factors that encourage gaming citation practices.
As feminist scholar Sara Ahmed writes, "I would describe citation as a rather successful reproductive technology, a way of reproducing the world around certain bodies.... The reproduction of a discipline can be the reproduction of these techniques of selection, ways of making certain bodies and thematics core to the discipline, and others not even part."
On the racial politics of citation, Victor Ray states, "Citations draw our attention to the ideas that supposedly matter, they are a measure of one’s intellectual influence and they shape what we are able to think about a given field. Citations, or a lack thereof, bolster reputations and facilitate or exclude one from subsequent opportunities."
Citation Politics, a term I prefer to reframe as the "Citation Game," extends beyond the existing discourse. This phrase better encapsulates the dynamics among scientists regarding referencing and citing each other's work; this phenomenon has taken a troubling turn with a rising prevalence of biases. Nowadays, the lines between constructive referencing and manipulation blur as journal reviewers overtly request authors to include citations in their papers; manipulation of citations has evolved into a strategic tool aimed at inflating the Impact Factor of publications, which becomes intertwined with university rankings, addressing this issue necessitates a rigorous investigation to enhance the integrity and quality of scholarly contributions in the realm of citations. -- Dr. Manju Naika
We invite reflection and action on how Wikidata, as a linked open database with ties to search engines and Wikipedia and with querying and visualization with SPARQL and Scholia, might help diversify who and what gets cited in the field of LIS.
Choose an item you want to upload to Wikidata by adding your initials to Column E, "Claimed by", and copy the URL in Column A. Choose one without a QID listed in Column D and double check that that item doesn't exist in Wikidata already!
In Zotero, import your chosen item using the URL/DOI and Zotero will try to find as much metadata as possible for that item. Depending on Mac vs. PC, the process might look slightly different. Screenshot of software Zotero for Mac, showing importing a DOI (Mac) Screenshot of software Zotero for Windows, showing importing a DOI (Windows)
Change your Zotero settings to export your metadata in a QuickStatements-ready format. (full instructions here: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Zotero)Screenshot of Zotero preferences for QuickStatements Export (Mac) (Mac) Screenshot of Zotero preferences for QuickStatements Export (Windows) (Windows)
Time to bring your Zotero item into QuickStatements! Go to https://quickstatements.toolforge.org/ and login. You will need to be an autoconfirmed user to access QuickStatements (see Notes section below). To import your Zotero item, you can drag and drop your item from Zotero to QuickStatements, copy and paste using Ctrl/Cmd+Shift+C and Ctrl/Cmd+V, or save the item as a text file. Screenshot of Zotero metadata and QuickStatements (Mac) Screenshot of Zotero metadata and QuickStatements (Windows) (Windows)
Review the data in QuickStatements - does everything make sense? If so, click "Import V1 Commands" and then on the next page, click "Run".
Open up the item in Wikidata and see your contributions! You can now repeat this process and create more Wikidata items!
Notes:
QuickStatements requires users to be autoconfirmed. If you are not autoconfirmed, you should be able to manually edit an item in Wikidata and after ~50 edits, your account should be autoconfirmed! You can still use Zotero and Ctrl/Cmd+Shift+C and Ctrl/Cmd+V the item's metadata into a text file editor (Word, Notepad, TextEdit, etc.) and see the P properties and values, which you can use to manually create your item at Wikidata.org.
For participants unable to use the QuickStatements method: we have added a Manual Article Creation tab to our spreadsheet with data that can be added to Wikidata manually.
Today's Working Hour is part of a special series of sessions involving a single data set. You don't have to attend every session to be part of the project, but you can find details about the whole series here.
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