Wikidata:WikiProject LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group/Affinity Group Calls/Meeting Notes/2020-05-19

Call Agenda

• Date: 2020-05-19
• Topic: Wikidata + Education projects in Brazil--"If Wikidata is the solution...what is the need?"
• Speaker: João Alexandre Peschanski

Presentation Materials

• Call agenda
• Slides

Meeting Notes

• What are we trying to develop with Wikidata?
• Bring projects led as professor, Wikimedian and researcher and try to distill understanding of how we are crossing a frontier in education--computational communications
  • Less theoretical than it is practical
  • Have strong theoretical sense of what we are doing
• Show how we’ve been exploring Wikidata in Brazil
  • Ederporto, GiFontenelle and EricaAzzellini and others
• Why talking about a need--not so clear what can be achieved with Wikidata?
  • Know how to achieve metrics in Wikipedia
  • With Wikidata exploring new phase of Wikimedia projects and education
• Explore Wikidata as a solution through 3 projects
• Wikidata has become solution to solve 3 needs
  • How can we improve efficiently and effectively content on municipal elections in Brazil on Wikipedia?
    • Good sources of information are hard for people to access and understand
  • How can we reconcile data from heterogenous databases on killed and disappeared in Brazilian military dictatorship?
    • Disagreeing data--4 databases that disagree--how to reconcile data?
  • How can we map if monuments in São Paulo are where they are claimed to be?
    • How to think of Wikidata as creating new information architecture
• Accessory use
  • Wikidata as a resource for Wikimedia projects
  • Human editors can get bored
    • Start to make mistakes that could be prevented with use of automated resources
    • Interesting connection between bots and humans--need human editors to make reasonable decision about content
• Structuring Wikidata with intentionality
  • Students working on articles in Wikipedia
  • Creating a template to create output of electoral results in table form in Wikipedia sandbox using data from Wikidata
    • Discussion about making process easier for users
  • Gives student structure for working on article
    • Introduction written with templates, can see infobox, tables (brought in automatically)
    • Students can work on analysis part of article now that the rest has been automated
• Wikibook in Portuguese
  • Book created on famous photographer
  • Create digital book with images uploading
  • Creating Reasonator illustration of the page with photograph
    • Descriptive elements
    • Queries
    • Set of tools you can connect with
    • Code behind this one line--only important element is the Wikidata item--everything being transcluded from Wikidata
      • Can converge several tools that have been created by people in several countries to one place
        • Wikidata Art Explorer--can describe image with depicts statements
• Power of Wikidata as an accessory for very cool projects
• Question: In the election page process, is the introductory paragraph also generated from Wikidata?
  • Yes--use a structured narrative template for it
• Do the students edit Wikidata?
  • Yes
• How do you check any mistaken description added to an image?
  • Trust community
  • Museums check what’s added and whether
  • AI can help
• Towards a structured Wikimedia
  • Have people work on what requires intelligence and creativity
    • Azzellini et al. (2019)
    • Vrandecic (2020)
• Metadata curation
  • Wikidata as a solution for disagreeing data
    • Statements could all be true, so not necessarily choose one over other, but interconnect them
    • Need a language across the databases--language of reconciliation
    • Human editors reasonable--able to solve data conundra
      • This is where students are editing
  • Military dictatorship databases
    • Can completely disagree
    • Who is right the worst question to ask
    • Need to assume everyone right and create dialog
    • List generated by ListeriaBot
      • Transclusion of references--depends on database
    • Edits done by students
      • Disagreeing data--checked where information coming from
        • Is it a typo?--look at birth certificates, primary sources
        • Actual disagreement that can’t be solved--keep both data
      • Students have worked on editing the people on Wikipedia who have been killed during the dictatorship
    • Using Wikidata to create common language
  • Developed a game
    • Check the museum collection
    • How many of these things are seen in image?
      • Museum can collect information and see if what has been done as community is useful and then can bring back to local database
    • Question: Could the form for game be designed to work with Cradle and Schema (ShEx)?
      • Can follow up with Eder
  • Roundtripping--use structured data on commons with hope of eventually rountripping
    • Ex. this item in Wikicommons M74329853 same as File:Manifestação estudantil contra a Ditadura Militar 577.tif we need to define an easy way like ORCID or DOI to add the location of a picture(s) so we can easy check the M74329853 were we find other pictures and can then extracmetadata from more places t
• Towards a meta-database
  • Data artifacts
    • Wikidata as computational media process
    • Creating what we can’t find on the internet
  • Question: What distinguishes “new digital objects” in this case from “original research”? Or are they OR? WD, like WP, discourages that: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:What_Wikidata_is_not
    • Less about creating new objects, but checking investigative elements
  • Data can be visually investigated and can lead to creating new  digital objects
  • Journalism objects created based on Wikidata
    • Queries
      • City government stating where monuments located--public database
        • Could check to see if monuments were there--not stolen, moved, mistaken location
        • Student went to check that monument location was where it should be and edited in Wikidata
        • Can then use query to generate map
          • Can see irregularity of monuments across the city--cultural deserts in poorer communities
            • Not an initial thought from project, but emerged and was used in São Paulo newspapers
          • Could check how many women depicted on monument?
            • 9 of 1200 monuments depicted them
        • By using Wikidata your content can continually improve
      • Map done from Wikimedia to check dams that were at risk
        • Yellow dots considered dams that could lead to disaster
        • Green and blue okay or almost okay
        • Check each dam with students
          • Call dams and communicate with technicians
          • Some missing information--doesn’t exist
          • Investigative use of Wikidata
            • Items already exist on Wikidata
              • Done as hackathon
      • Using Wikidata as element to organize references
        • Articles used on Wikipedia in Portuguese and brought to Wikidata
        • Relies on Scholia
        • Can check most frequent keywords that journal has
        • Check images of authors and which authors published the mosts and visualize their connections
        • Had Wikidata lab on this work
      • Accessibility
        • Spoken Wikipedia
          • Through Wikidata having students create audible versions of paintings that are then associated with the Wikidata entry and eventually show up in Wikipedia infoboxes
          • Can provide very quickly a set of products that museums, NGOs could rely on
          • Language determined at this point--only have Brazilian Portuguese
          • Structure depicts so audible versions can be available in any language
  • Query based media production
    • Can distill more theoretical points
      • Structuring Wikipedia--structured gambiarra--workaround--not sure just try it
      • Interconnecting databases
      • Querying
    • Innovations in process, objects/product
    • Thinking about Wikidata as part of ecology in digital world
    • Data literacy included in academic curriculum
    • Received 300,000 images that know nothing about because were censored during military dictatorship
      • Structured data on Commons as first step to see what is in picture
      • Can eventually find when image was taken
      • Hopes will be able to query in future
  • Invitation to Wikidata Lab XXIII--Shani Evanstein--thinking about Wikidata and education connection--working on Ph.D.
  • Question: How to transclude Wikibooks from wikidata items?
  • Added to Wikibooks in Portuguese a module that allows us to create structured narrative template: https://pt.wikibooks.org/wiki/M%C3%B3dulo:Mbabel
  • Question: What advice do you have for people hosting wikidata hackathons for undergraduate students?
    • Think about need--less about learning technology--don’t make good use of technology they know how to use
    • Need that they can solve--empowerment
    • Could be more meaningful as framing as solving issue--festival--people engage with project because of making a difference in world--not based around technology
    • Make sure that doesn’t get boring--need to automate part of the work, so can build upon that
    • Development hackathon--empowering student to present development
      • Wikidata Labs usually very technical--choose an undergrad or recent grad student to present--have 3-4 months to prepare presentation--everyone can learn it and learn to the point where you can collaboratively share it
      • Tec
  • Question: is it possible to automate data insertion using some technology together with curriculo lattes?
    • Academic curriculum database in Brazil--should be able to provide in CSV, but doesn’t work
    • Should be possible--data is available, but there are some political barriers
    • Requires real technical investment--don’t make easy for automatic scraping
    • Often scrape databases--contact institutions if cannot get through the government