Wikidata:WikiProject LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group/Affinity Group Calls/Meeting Notes/2022-03-08

Call Details

• Date: 2022-03-08
• Topic: Wikidata in the classroom
• Presenters: Stacy Allison-Cassin, Cora Coady, Adam Cavanaugh, and Devin Frede

Presentation Materials

• Call agenda

Meeting Notes

• Wikidata and Learning Descriptive Practices
  • Stacy Allison-Cassin
  • Adam Cavanaugh
  • Cora Coady
  • Devon Frede
    • All students in LIS class at University of Toronto (Representing Accessing and Documenting Cultural Record)
      • Similar to an intro to cataloging course, but not focused on bibliographic description
      • No course learning outcomes referring to Linked Data
      • Good home (potentially) for Wikidata project
      • Helps to learn documentation of cultural records by doing it
    • Why Wikidata?
      • Online, light weight (don’t need special accounts or access), students can do something they can take with them, has life beyond classroom and adds content to the world
    • Learning Outcomes
      • Real world practice in creating cultural records
      • Understand key issues (data standards, copyright, parts of the cultural record)
      • Understand relationship between cultural records and issues in contemporary culture and society
      • Data literacy
    • Scaffolded Project
      • 4 components (project plan, cultural records, class presentation, final critical reflection)
      • Ensure students would work on it through the term
      • Project plan there teach planning skills
      • “Lightning talk” format for presentations
      • Final paper a contextualization of the project

• Thematic areas
  • Covid 19 (winter 2021 only)
  • Local neighborhood documentation
  • Ecology and climate justice (winter 2021 only)
  • Food (winter 2021 only)
    • Logistics
      • Create 5 wikidata items
      • Outreach Dashboard to track items
      • Wiki Edu Wikidata Tutorials were made available
      • Wiki Resource page
      • Lab sessions
    • Challenges
      • Going from zero to Linked data
      • Some thematic areas harder to understand
      • Items requiring creation of many dependent items
      • Some students had items deleted

• Positives
  • Constraint flags
  • Adding external identifiers demonstrated relationships
  • Students needed to parse objects into discrete data
  • Encouraging understanding of triple
  • Encouraged decision making and ethical considerations
  • Focused more on references for second run of the course project

• Cora Coady: IM4 Media Lab-Indigenous Matriarchs
  • Focuses on teaching supporting Indigenous artists about virtual reality
  • Documented creators and their works
  • Valuable practice, allowed for a high level of comfort with PCC Wikiprojects; advanced skills and was able to do batch uploads
  • Recognizing Canada as a nation/place is often a personal choice for Indigenous Peoples; ultimately included “Canada” for discoverability, but had to think about it
  • Good warm-up for RDA and the concept of shared resources; have similar principles and goals
  • Highlights collaborative practices
  • Increased confidence, good to see real world impact
  • Effective learning through personal motivation (Wikidata has few barriers to access, can be effective in promoting under-represented information)
  • Indigenous Peoples often feel obligation to talk about historic and current issues, also important to highlight achievements to offset landscape of trauma

• Adam Cavanaugh
  • High Park Biodiversity
  • Conceptual conflict in organizing info around municipal space versus ecosystems
  • Changed focus to The High Park Black Oak Savannah
  • Created entries for initiatives and center as well
  • Began to document savannah visually through images uploaded to Wikimedia Commons
  • Lead to questions of work in context of Canadian colonial settlement
  • Uneasy classifying lands with municipal coordinates alone
  • “Savannah” itself also a term with historic and current colonial associations
  • Open inquiry and discussion with peers indispensable
  • Worked on Wikipedia Black History Edit-a-Thon, work in digital libraries, developing with local art spaces archives
  • Wikidata project as important trailhead
• Devin Frede
  • Public Parks in Toronto’s Annex Neighborhood
  • Privately Owned Public Spaces (POPS)
  • Technically open to public but monitored and limited areas
  • Documented 9 public parks not already in Wikidata using 9 statements, took images
  • Started with capturing images for reference park exists, went on bike tour and took field notes (esp. on facilities)
  • Tried to take representative photo, many parks in this area are small
  • Decisions: Park, urban park, parkette, pocket park, or square? Wanted more detail than park, city of Toronto terminology doesn’t necessarily align with Wikidata description, sourcing facilities information, coordinate location vs. street address vs. location (neighborhood)
  • Link each park to Wikidata item for neighborhood
  • Possible could have added value for “public space” to make access clearer
  • Describing as “parks” does rely on legal framework of colonial government

• Conclusion
  • Good vehicle for describing, thinking through the ways description influences the spaces we move through, common themes across student projects that speak to some of the issues with Wikidata and description itself
  • Lot of promise in doing this kind of work again, has potential to do important work people care about
  • Also creating a project that is fun, interesting, meaningful
  • Required class might seem like not the most enjoyable but wants to do something meaningful and enjoyable
• Q&A
  • Love idea doing metadata work should be enjoyable
  • Interest in pizza ontology
    • Craft beer edit-a-thon in a few months, contact if experienced
    • Has anyone done much teaching with Wikidata?
      • Thinking about references?
        • Understanding what should/shouldn’t have a reference is unclear, what makes a good reference can also be difficult, finding appropriate documentation (example: Public artwork) was difficult. Had to respond to things on deletion nominations list (nominated unfairly, seen as not being notable, may be creeping over in not good ways from Wikipedia)
          • Can start with sources or things with ex: ISNI numbers, helps people get on even footing and expand. Struggled with creating documentation that shows what you “need” to include?
            • Can be cataloger’s judgment, teaching judgment is part of the work, it’s kind of your call in a lot of ways and can be very flexible. Part of the learning process of describing a cultural record. Every information system has an ideology and a point, and you need to think about goals of your description. Goes to use of items, you have to get beyond thinking of Wikidata as the end. Differences in what people think is important, and we can be flexible on some things, what is not included can be interesting. Difference between describing in a narrative and describing using metadata.
      • Pizza Ontology links from chat
        • http://protegeproject.github.io/protege/getting-started/
        • https://protegewiki.stanford.edu/wiki/Protege4Pizzas10Minutes

• Did the class use SPARQL?
  • Not much the first time did the class, second time did spend time trying out visualizations, but not too much, took one week on queries

• Hadn’t thought about things like chess tables
  • Hadn’t come up in preliminary searches, dog fountains another thing that came up, something to be said for going to spaces as a stage of documentation
  • Projects that focused on local area documentation (especially Devin and Adam) showed sometimes physical spaces and Wikidata don’t line up exactly
    • Also nice that Wikidata is multilingual, students can work in languages other than English, move between languages

• Thanks to everyone who creates documentation?
• Recommendations to future teachers?
  • Balance between leaving project choice and recognizing some areas are better documented than others (food was difficult) and balancing availability of choice and what can easily be done in Wikidata
  • Lot of marking, had to look at all the items
• Announcement — core interest group week is ongoing, consider registering for the Catalog Form and Function IG session later this week
• Did students interact with Wikidata projects or Telegram?
  • No telegram channels, one student went on to an internship, did talk about it being a community but not much interaction
• If anyone is interested in a beginner session for creating wikidata items, event this Saturday https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Meetup/Philadelphia/WikiSalon_2022-03-12