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Wikidata:WikiProject LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group/Affinity Group Calls/Starting A Wikidata Project

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 Welcome Events Affinity Group Coordination 


Project background

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In February and March of 2025, we are continuing to pilot a new format that combines our previous calls and working hours. In this the third of these series, Eric Willey will facilitate a series of four sessions focused on starting a Wikidata project from the foundation up at your institution.

Series sessions

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Session 1 (February 4) - Selling it to Admin

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Projects need staff time or money to succeed, and we’re all short on both. This session will discuss strategies for convincing your administrators that allocating resources to a Wikidata Project will benefit your users and institution. While Eric works in a university library, this discussion is intended to be as broad as possible and participants from GLAM or other institutions outside the academic library setting are very welcome!

This session was on Tuesday, February 4, 2025 at 9am PT / 12pm ET / 17:00 UTC / 6pm CET (Time zone converter).

Recording: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:LD4_Wikidata_Affinity_Group_Meeting_2025-02-04_Starting_a_Wikidata_Project_at_Your_Institution_1_of_4.webm

Recording of a presentation on convincing administration to support a Wikidata pilot project.
Notes (click "expand" on the right to see the notes)

STARTING WIKIDATA AT YOUR INSTITUTION

Session 1: Selling it to Admin

MOST PEOPLE DON'T CARE ABOUT LINKED DATA FOR ITS OWN SAKE

  • They care about what it can do for them (you can explain that to them!)​, e.g. how does WD benefit them
  • Or they care about a niche thing (ex: Civil War letter transcription)​
  • If you start talking about Q numbers and properties... good luck...​
  • So let's sell Wikidata based on institutional priorities and what it can do for admin (i.e. what do they want, what do they not want)

HOW TO KNOW WHAT'S IMPORTANT TO ADMIN?

  • Where are they spending money (budgets)​
  • Annual reports​ - what is emphasized in the report as a reflection of admin's priorities
  • What are the news releases talking about (news stories, newsletters, social media)​
  • Where are new hires being made, resources allocated (or cuts being made)​
  • Anniversaries, events, etc. ​
  • Who is donating money/donor relations​ (e.g. can WD be a source of donor interest)
  • Ask them​
  • Other ideas?
    • AI
    • Strategic plan
    • What data they buy/use
    • Mission statement
    • Speak to the heads of academic departments

HIGHLIGHT LOCAL COLLECTIONS

  • Wikidata can highlight your local/unique collections​
  • Centralized platform for disambiguating people and collocating (co-locates) biographical info (and identifiers) about them​
  • Information and platform are non-proprietary and accessible to all (no silos!)​
  • You can lead users back to your local finding aids, biographies, archives, etc. with properties and references​
  • Low notability requirements (much lower than Wikipedia)​
  • Ideas for highlighting local collections
    • Dynamic reporting on academic publishing
    • Linking to institutional repositories
    • Linking to Wikimedia Commons
    • WikiProject pages as public documentation of mostly local/internal projects
    • Sharing reports on progress

CONTRIBUTING TO GLOBAL METADATA​

  • Data Reuse Days Conference ​

https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Event_talk:Data_Reuse_Days_2025​

  • Integrated into platforms like Knowledge Graphs, openArtBrowser, Cita, Entity Explosion, Scholia, etc.​
  • Included in identifiers such as LoC NARs (Library of Congress Name Authority Records), VIAF (Virtual International Authority File), etc. ​
  • People around the world will see this and be able to reuse it.​

OPEN ACCESS INITIATIVES

  • Non-proprietary platform ​
  • Creative Commons CC0 Public Domain License​
  • No copyright restrictions​
  • No citations needed

LANGUAGE LEARNING MODELS OR "AI"​

  • The machine readable and OA nature of Wikidata means that LLMs can easily access and understand it for their queries​
  • Similarly, Wikidata describes relationships between objects in a way that machines can understand ​
  • Wikidata and Artificial Intelligence: Simplified Access to Open Data for Open-Source Projects

https://diff.wikimedia.org/2024/09/23/wikidata-and-artificial-intelligence-simplified-access-to-open-data-for-open-source-projects/)

PROMOTING MEMBER SCHOLARLY AND CREATIVE (AND OTHER!) ACTIVITY

  • Explicitly associates work with people and people with your institution​
  • Books, papers, grants, awards, fellowships, etc.​
  • Raises your institutions research profile​
  • Articles, exhibits, art, etc. can receive individual metadata​
  • Metadata isn't silo'ed in a local catalog or platform, but can lead back to local platforms
  • Other ideas
    • Showing examples others at different institutions have done
    • Discoverability of content

PUBLIC RELATIONS​

  • When prospective patrons/donors/students search for your institution on the web they will see an LLM summary before ever going to your homepage​
  • Add data to Wikidata and you have more relationships to other items, upping your institution's chances of appearing​
  • Can highlight famous people associated with your institution, sportsball things (go sportsball!), organizations, events, etc.​
  • Historic and current ​
  • Major institutions participating in Wikidata (Library of Congress, MIT, Stanford, etc.)​
  • Other ideas
    • Highlighting up and coming faculty
    • Open Science policies (for funded projects notably) --Wikidata is more permanent than project websites

COST

  • No additional costs for the institution (i.e. platform or subscription fees) beyond staff time ​
  • Grants for special events​
  • A robust user community of volunteers that regularly enhance items by hand or with bots (free to the institution labor!)​
  • No paywalls (can be accessed, re-used, re-mixed without payment) for users​
  • Tutorials, automation tools, etc.​
  • Because it is no cost to the user, adopted by under-funded institutions

COMMUNITY/PATRON ENGAGEMENT

  • With a low barrier to entry you can promote edit-a-thons on almost any topic​
  • In-person, virtual, or hybrid events​
  • People engaging with your materials or things important to them and your institution​
  • Low-barrier to entry, most people can be editing/adding items quickly
  • Other Ideas
    • We do an annual one for Black women writers, related to the Black Bibliography Project
    • Cookbooks/recipes
    • Women in Music edit-a-thon
    • You can do a project series with the Wikidata Affinity Group
    • Wikidata very useful for community engagement
    • Archaeological sites and artifacts

HIRING

  • Mention it to potential candidates as an "exciting new thing we're exploring"​
  • Shows there is an interest at your institution in doing this kind of work​
  • A world-wide networking opportunity for our employees
  • Other ideas
    • Wikidata can be edited remotely
    • opportunity for student employees to engage

MULTILINGUAL

  • Multilingual by design​
  • One version of Wikidata for all languages​
  • More equitable access to knowledge ​
  • (Some) translation done for you

https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:WikiProject_LD4_Wikidata_Affinity_Group/Affinity_Group_Calls/Second_Project_Series

  • Metadata for non-written knowledge

STABLE AND PROVEN TECHNOLOGY

  • Launched 29 October 2012​
  • Robust user community to provide support​
  • 1.57 billion item statements as of mid-2024​
  • Wikidata Affinity Group members will help with your project​
  • A lot of existing projects and documentation to get you started
  • Other ways
    • User interface intuitive and shows up in browser
    • Powerful search and querying

WHAT ELSE???​

  • What is something Wikidata does that will make your administrator's eye's light up?
  • Digital humanities is a useful term
  • The Wikidata community helps create/foster relationships among staff at multiple institutions
  • Genealogy
  • Local audience at institution may have interests and expertise and use their knowledge to contribute to Wikidata
  • I guess my main concern that I'm hoping someone may have an answer to - how do you answer the idea of duplication of effort? Like explaining the benefit of inputting metadata for a name authority on Wikidata after doing the same on Connexion or something similar.

contributions to Wikidata are more reusable, whereas data contributed to OCLC is owned by OCLC

  • This is an interesting point because, as pointed out above, I see the goal to be creating a good description once and reusing that

also just technically easier to work with Wikidata using OpenRefine, QuickStatements, SPARQL

  • I often cite LC NAF in my Wikidata items
  • I often cite Wikidata in my LC NAF records.
  • One thing is that NACO and Wikidata have different citation standards. If info comes from a phone call with the author, that can be recorded in NACO but not in Wikidata, unless you cite the NACO record.
  • PCC Entity Management Cooperative has been getting underway, and will likely involve creating Wikidata items: https://wiki.lyrasis.org/display/PFCCP/EMCO
  • I'm interested in using Wikidata to do literature reviews (as a researcher) : importing research item metadata, mapping topics, bibliometry (link with scholia)

QUESTIONS
Q: As a non-librarian, how could I get the librarian of my institution interested in Wikidata?
A:

  • Find something librarian already interested in and use it to show them a demo of Wikidata, ie. how easy it is to add something to improve an item on Wikidata
  • It might depend on the librarian's background.
  • See the work of Darnelle Melvin at UNLV

LINKS
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:WikiProject_Linked_Data_for_Production/Practical_Wikidata_for_Librarians
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Events
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:WikiProjects



Session 2 (February 18) - Choosing a Project

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We don’t need to reinvent the can of worms just to nail jell-o to a half-baked pie. This session will focus on current and historical Wikidata projects on various themes and their documentation/outcomes, along with other resources for your project. Those resources can be re-used or adapted to a project at your institution, giving you a valuable head-start and eliminating some of the planning and initial groundwork.

This session was on Tuesday, February 18, 2025 at 9am PT / 12pm ET / 17:00 UTC / 6pm CET (Time zone converter).

Recording: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:LD4_Wikidata_Affinity_Group_Meeting_2025-02-18_Starting_a_Wikidata_Project_at_Your_Institution_2_of_4.webm

Recording of a presentation on choosing an initial Wikidata pilot project for your institution.
Notes (click "expand" on the right to see the notes)

STARTING WIKIDATA AT YOUR INSTITUTION

Session 2: Choosing a Project

Last Session We Discussed How to Show Wikidata's Value to Your Admin. Now let's...

  • Generate some ideas for possible projects connected to your institution​
  • Look for project procedures and documentation that others have created to get you started​
  • Start noodling on some project ideas​
  • Have two or three (limited!) project ideas at the end of the session that line up with things your institutional admin supports

Some General Advice

  • Small projects are good! Do the thing, reflect on the thing, improve the thing next time!​
  • Focus on quality, not quantity!​
    • If this is a first project you can say, "Look at this cool thing we did on a shoestring! Now if we had more resources, we could..."​
  • Build a series of small, successful projects before pitching the big ones (people like betting on winners)!
  • Have an endpoint! Don't make your project(s) a life sentence!​
  • And an exit strategy! Reinforce success, and if something doesn't work out move on!​
  • You don't have to create new items, there's lots of value in improving existing items and building connections!

Find the Wikidata Item for Your Institution or Parent Institution

  • Give it a look, does it seem accurate? Complete-ish?​
  • Click on the "instance of" property(s) and see if there are model items you can look at for ideas  ​
  • Put the Q number for your institution in "Pages that link to" and see what existing links there are: https://www.wikidata.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3AWhatLinksHere ​
  • Look for categories and check "view history" to see who created items and links (potential partners!)

Projects re: Institutions, Organizations, etc.

LINKED open data​

  • Links are good​
  • But they have to be created​
  • Can sometimes be unclear if the process is institution => person, person => institution, or institution <=> person​
  • Rely on practices (where documented), work of others, and best judgment
  • Ex: Charles Edward Hovey (Q5077276)
    • [Image showing Wikidata item for Charles Edward Hovey with statements linking his item to the item for Illinois State University]
  • Ex: Illinois State University (Q558922)
    • [Image showing Wikidata item for Illinois State University with statements linking this item to the item for Charles Edward Hovey]

Properties to Link People to Your Institution

  • affiliation (P1416) - organization that a person or organization is affiliated with (not necessarily member of or employed by)​
  • member of (P463) or has member (Q65971553) ​
  • educated at (P69) or alumnus (Q508719) ​
  • funder of (Q104243645) or funder (P8324) ​
  • founded by (P112) or founder of (Q65972149) ​
  • endorsed by (P8001), sponsor (P859), etc.
  • Link: Author Disambiguator tool makes replacing author strings very easy: https://author-disambiguator.toolforge.org/
  • Idea: some musuems have webpages devoted to significant donors--if you're at an institution that depends on the kindness of donors, that might be a reasonable hook for a reluctant administration
  • Idea: If parts of your institution are named after significant people or donors, that's a great opportunity for builing out projects using the "named after" property

People

Check for Links to/from

  • Take a minute to check Wikidata items for your organization and one or two prominent people associated with it to see if there's a connection between the two​
  • Jot down a term you'd use to describe the relationship​
  • Chairpersons or presidents could be another good, limited scope project that administration would understand and support ​
  • Probably readily available references online (maybe on your own institution's homepage)

Athletics

Scholarship and Creative Activity​

Link: Cradle for awards: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Cradle#award

ETDs (Electronic Theses and Dissertations)

Translation Projects

  • Translate existing items into other languages​
  • Wikidata is multi-lingual by design​
  • Talk to people about translation projects​
  • To English, from English, both, or entirely non-English languages ​
  • All can be ways to get interested people to engage with items relevant to your institution​
  • Help:Multilingual: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Help:Multilingual

Faculty

Genealogy


Archives and Archival Collections​


General Resources


Wikidata:Status updates

WikiProject Linked Data for Production/Practical Wikidata for Librarians


WikiProject PCC Wikidata Pilot/Pilot Best Practices

LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group

  • Present your project at one session and have a group of volunteers add/edit items for the next three!​
  • Happy to discuss ideas, answer questions, etc. (most discussion happens on our Discord)!​
  • An enthusiastic and knowledgeable user community here to help!
  • From Susan Deborah Radovsky : Coordinator meetings are non-hierarchical and monthly!
    • From Sarah Kasten : They're hierarchical in that I sometimes make people answer silly icebreaker questions, but in a fun way (promise!), and that's the extent of there being bossy-ness.
  • From David Fiora : what's the discord server link?
    • Eric mistakenly said "Discord" when he meant "Slack." At the time of the session (2025-02-18) there was no known official Discord for the LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group.


What's Next?

THANK YOU!​

  • Question from chat: What strategies people may deploy to not make projects life sentence?
    • THATcamp guideline: "When it's over, it's over" -- clarify when project will be done
  • From Bob Kosovsky : I note that some museums go as far as having webpages devoted to significant donors. If you're at an institution that depends on the kindness of donors, that might be a reasonable hook for a reluctant administration.
  • From Sarah Kasten : Curious what strategies people may deploy, or are deploying, to not make their projects life sentences? The graph wants to keep growing!
    • From Mary Campany : This is also something I struggle with.
    • From Karly Wildenhaus (she/her) : I think part of the beauty of Wikidata is some of the never-ending work is not on any one contributor, if you document how to make contributions related to your institution, any wikidata user can build on your work
    • From Karly Wildenhaus (she/her): I always talk about wikidata as iterative, you can start a stub record that we know other contributors will add to and build upon over time
    • From Crystal Yragui : OpenRefine is a power tool for projects like this
    • From Mary Aycock (she/her): It's always interesting to get reports of contributions to the Wikidata item you created (often bots).
    • From Bob Kosovsky : As Karly said, the beauty of Wikimedia projects is that once you start something, others will enhance and add content
  • From Bob Kosovsky : A constructive attitude is: don't think of this as work; it's fun!
  • From Karly Wildenhaus (she/her) : if parts of your institution are named after significant people or donors, that's a great opportunity for building out projects using the "named after" property
  • From Mohammed Awal (He/Him): I'm thinking of a project to have wiki data on all basic schools in Ghana. That will be under educational institutions. Where should I start from or how do I go about that? There might be some items for some few schools already but I want to have all in an organized project
    • From Mohammed Awal (He/Him): Thanks everyone for sharing your ideas with me
  • From John Mark Ockerbloom : I’ve co-run one larger wikidata project, and while it did run for years, it had a pre-defined finite set of entities to work with, which helped.
  • From Nancy Babb (UBuffalo) : Are others also adding images to Wikimedia commons, to enhance wikidata entries? I'm thinking along the lines of faculty, authors, and so on.
  • From Bob Kosovsky: You could even sponsor a contest at your institution to get students to add photographs to Commons
  • From Karly Wildenhaus (she/her): this makes me think another mini project after you add buildings/landmarks on your campus/related to your institution is adding images to Wikimedia Commons via WikiShootMe
  • From Karly Wildenhaus (she/her): Wikimedia NYC did a sort of walking tour/edit-a-thon based on WikiShootMe
  • From David Fiora: I am planning to use WikiShootMe with students as my school has few images on the commons, and also make associated entries
  • From Mohammed Awal (He/Him): Yeah! WikishootMe must be a fun way to add images to Wikidata items. I haven't tried that though


Session 3 (March 4) - Making the Most of Your Time and Work

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There is a saying in the Midwest, “If something is stuck don’t use force, just get a bigger hammer.” This session will focus on tools, gadgets and strategies to maximize your time and resources, automate work, and achieve more outcomes for your project. There are too many great resources to do a deep dive into each, but attendees will be introduced to a variety of tools they can then follow-up on for their own work.

This session was on Tuesday, March 4, 2025 at 9am PT / 12pm ET / 17:00 UTC / 6pm CET

Recording:

Recording of a presentation on Wikidata tools, scripts, and gadgets to increase output.
Notes (click "expand" on the right to see the notes)

STARTING WIKIDATA AT YOUR INSTITUTION

Session 3: Making the Most of Your Time and Work

THREE MAIN CATEGORIES

Gadgets​

Scripts​

Tools​

Please be thinking about your favorite(s) that I've missed​

Detailed instructions for adding gadgets and user scripts from Hilary Thorsen at https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1u2Jx5LbaTX6Q3_e9UBy6XAdkAGzKRZG2/edit#slide=id.p1

Wikidata Sandbox (Q4115189)

You can test gadgets and scripts in the sandbox without (potentially) breaking a live item ​

"This is a sandbox for testing changes to items. Please be gentle with it. Feel free to change anything on this page!"​ - https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q4115189


GADGETS

"Gadgets are plug-ins to enhance Wikidata display and editing. To add gadgets, go to the Preferences page while logged in and click the "Gadgets" tab." - WikiProject Linked Data for Production/Practical Wikidata for Librarians - https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Special:Preferences

[Image of Wikidata Preferences toolbar with "Gadgets" selected]

GADGETS: relateditems

Adds a button to the bottom of item pages to display inverse statements​

Especially for items with minimal information, can be useful in figuring out why an item was created​

And getting additional context (authored articles, won awards, affiliated with _______, etc.)​

Can then follow references from linked items for more info​

Even if there is minimal information

[Image of Wikidata item Q125226223 for Peter Tamblyn from 11 April 2024 showing only two statements: instance of > human and occupation > researcher URL: https://www.wikidata.org/w/index.php?title=Q125226223&oldid=2126103988]

relateditems can show context you can use to determine who someone is

[Image showing Derived statements for 3 scholarly articles Peter Tamblyn is author of]

GADGETS: Reasonator​

Adds a link to Reasonator on every item​ - https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Wikidata:Tools/Visualize_data#Reasonator

"Translates" Wikidata items into prose: ​

 "Eric Willey is a United States librarian, cataloger, archivist, academic, and professor."​

Another way to see related items


GADGETS: currentDate

Automatically adds the date of today while using the property retrieved (P813).

[Image showing a reference URL and a second reference using currentDate which has automatically filled in the date for the statement retrieved]

GADGETS: DuplicateReferences

Allows editors to drag and drop references to add them to other statements on the same item

Add one reference then drag and drop to other statements

[Image showing a reference being dragged and dropped to another statement]

WHAT ARE YOUR FAVORITE GADGETS?

Please add them to chat, the notes, or unmute!

Chat Bob Kosovsky: Recoin !!!

Chat Pilar Ramírez Amurrio: We have another Recoin in Spain https://www.fedeme.com/recoin/

Chat Sunita: Mobile, tab, my laptop, desktop also

Chat kevin kishimoto: just curious. Is there any downside to keeping a gadget enabled if you don't use it very often? Does it slow down your editing speed if you have too many checked?

Eric: Never noticed any slowdown

Chat kevin kishimoto: maybe just screen clutter?

Chat Bob Kosovsky: me neither.....same with Wikipedia doesn't slow things down

Chat Karly Wildenhaus: here's the gadgets we recommend for our NYPL WikiProject: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:WikiProject_New_York_Public_Library/Resources#Recommended_gadgets

Chat Pilar Ramírez Amurrio: My laptop

Chat Susan Deborah Radovsky: Oh, I haven't tried QuickPresets! That sounds great!

Chat David Fiora: more Identifiers: imports missing identifiers from VIAF

Chat Emma Clarkson: I use moreIdentifiers… I wonder how different that is from AC2WD?

Chat Mary Aycock: identifierInput: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Tools/Enhance_user_interface#identifierInput.js

Chat Karly Wildenhaus: I love this one! "When adding an identifier property it tries to strip that identifier out of the full URL"

Chat Susan Deborah Radovsky: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:WikiProject_Linked_Data_for_Production/Practical_Wikidata_for_Librarians#User_Scripts

SCRIPTS

"User scripts are short computer scripts written by Wikidata users that give additional functionality to the Wikidata user interface. Users can list the scripts they would like to add on a special page. Access your own special page via Special:Mypage/common.js, which will redirect you to your own common.js page to add scripts. Step by step slides with screenshots." -WikiProject Linked Data for Production/Practical Wikidata for Librarians - https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Special:MyPage/common.js - https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1u2Jx5LbaTX6Q3_e9UBy6XAdkAGzKRZG2/edit#slide=id.p27

List at Wikidata:Tools/Enhance user interface​ https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Tools/Enhance_user_interface

SCRIPTS: QuickPresets

Similar to a Cradle or form​ but in the Wikidata item ​

Fields can be customized based on "instance of"​ Add fields by clicking or searching and clicking​ https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/User:MichaelSchoenitzer/quickpresets

[Image showing an example of the QuickPresets script with various Quick Presets for instance of > Human related to creating Wikidata items for Illinois State University faculty]

SCRIPTS: Forage

"Forage is a user script that provides an additional editing interface that makes editing easier, by showing the expected properties for a page (based on its "instance of" values), and providing simple inputs to let users add values for any such property." - https://github.com/sanjay-thiyagarajan/forage ​

SCRIPTS: AC2WD

"This script adds an "AC2WD" link in the tools sidebar. ​

When you click on it, it uses the AC2WD tool to check the item for certain Authority Control IDs (eg VIAF).​

It then checks these AC datasets for statements (and more AC IDs).​

It will then add any new information it found as new statements, or add more references to existing statements where possible."​

https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/User:Magnus_Manske/ac2wd.js#installerLink

I added a VIAF to the sandbox and AC2WD added ISNI and LCCN (warnings are because it's in the sandbox item)

[Image showing ISNI and Library of Congress identifiers added to a Wikidata via AC2WD. The identifiers have warning flags because they were added to the sandbox item and are present in another Wikidata item.]

WHAT ARE YOUR FAVORITE SCRIPTS?

Please add them to chat, the notes, or unmute!

Chat Karly Wildenhaus: there is also a Mix'n'Match user script!

Chat Karly Wildenhaus: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Tools/Enhance_user_interface/en search mixnmatch_gadget

Chat Karly Wildenhaus: "Allows to make Mix'n'match matches from Wikidata."

Chat Bob Kosovsky: I've seen some Rapid Grants applied to editathons "for a worthy cause" (e.g. DEI)

Chat Sunita: Can I make my institute page on wikidata? I mean library

Eric: As long as it meets notability requirements (and I can't imagine why it wouldn't) I think so.

TOOLS

"Toolhub is a community-authored catalog of Wikimedia tools. ​ Discover new tools, promote their use in your wiki community, help improve them by contributing data."​

For all Wikimedia platforms​

3574 tools found (2/26/2025)​

https://toolhub.wikimedia.org/

TOOLS: QuickStatements

Adds and removes statements, labels, descriptions and aliases; as well as add statements with optional qualifiers and sources​

From text or spreadsheets ​

Version 3.0 recently released by Wikimedia Brazil ​  https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/QuickStatements_3.0

Source Metadata (SourceMD) can import metadata for papers, authors, etc. via unique identifiers and export to QuickStatements – Source Metadata https://sourcemd.toolforge.org/ [Ope, partially deactivated due to rewrite - https://magnustools.toolforge.org/]​ ​

Zotero (with the Wikidata Quickstatements translator) can do the same - Wikidata:Zotero https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Zotero

TOOLS: Cradle

On Toolhub: https://toolhub.wikimedia.org/tools/toolforge-cradle ​

Page with form data: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Cradle#award ​

Cradles page: https://cradle.toolforge.org/#/ ​

Essentially a customized form for creating Wikidata items​

Great for introducing new users to Wikidata

TOOLS: Open Refine

"A free data wrangling tool to work with messy data, to clean and improve it, and to connect it with knowledge bases." - Toolhub https://toolhub.wikimedia.org/tools/openrefine​ ​

"In OpenRefine terminology, reconciliation is the process of linking free-text tabular cells to identifiers in knowledge bases. OpenRefine's built-in reconciliation capabilities make it a versatile tool to reconcile tabular data to a wide range of databases, including Wikidata." - Wikidata:Tools/OpenRefine: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Tools/OpenRefine ​ ​

Great for cleaning up, transforming, and reconciling data

TOOLS: Mix 'n' Match

Mix'n'match contains over 4,500 datasets and allows people to match names to Wikidata entries, using several different modes.​

You can go through by database and match names (ex:AstroGen)

[Image showing 4 AstroGen IDs and possible Wikidata matches]

Or you can search by name (I did not know this until recently)

[Image showing a name search in Mix 'n' Match for Rita Parai and possible matches from Academic Tree, Dimeonsions author ID, and Astrogen datasets]

TOOLS: Author Disambiguator

Author Disambiguator is a tool for converting text strings for authors of works into Wikidata items. - https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Tools/Author_Disambiguator ​

"The aim of this tool is to assist in converting those strings into links to author items as efficiently and easily as possible."​

Great for efficiently editing and improving existing items.

GRANTS

Wikimedia Research Fund: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Programs/Wikimedia_Research_%26_Technology_Fund/Wikimedia_Research_Fund ​ ​ Wikimedia Rapid Funds: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Project/Rapid ​ ​ Generally small grants that don't require a lot of work to apply for

BOTS

"Bots (also known as robots) are tools used to make edits without the necessity of human decision-making." - https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Bots​

If you see a bot making edits you've been doing manually, consider letting the bot do them for you (or contact the bot maintainer about running it on your items).​

Steve Baskauf's blog discusses bots - http://baskauf.blogspot.com/

WHAT ARE YOUR FAVORITE TOOLS?

Please add them to chat, the notes, or unmute!

WISH LIST

What is a task that you wish there was a gadget, script, or tool for? Please add ideas to chat, the notes, or unmute!

Chat Susan Deborah Radovsky: A member of our community showed me this article: https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/TGDK.2.2.8 . Idea for a domain-specific, multi modal approach. It's about art, Karly!

Chat Susan Deborah Radovsky: Beg your pardon for mentioning it, but do we see AI coming in at all?

Chat Bob Kosovsky: Actually - this is perhaps tangential - but I've heard of (and used myself) ChatGPT for creating SPARQL scripts


Chat Karly Wildenhaus: re: AI, there's Spinach from Stanford specifically for Wikidata queries: https://spinach.genie.stanford.edu/

Chat Karly Wildenhaus: would really love to see an ArchivesSpace agent <> Wikidata plugin! I know there are some conversations about this idea already underway. (I will share more to the #wikidata Slack channel as these conversations gain momentum). the idea would be to import agents into ArchivesSpace from Wikidata, and potentially sync updates

Chat Bob Kosovsky: gosh....dreaming here...wonder if there could be a Wikidta/ArchivesSpace usergroup

Chat kevin kishimoto: I would love a tool that allows you to more-easily write sparql that could create separate columns based on qualifier values. Basically, if the qualifier for the properties is a certain value, make a separate column. ... oh wow, i need to look at this spinach thing

Chat Karly Wildenhaus: you can do that with SPARQL! I'll share an example, one moment. example: https://w.wiki/CwpR you have to request the full statement in your query, but you can build off of this one

Chat David Fiora: I am interested in using APIs in wikidata, but do not have a lot of experience with them, anyone have advice on where to start

Chat Sarah Kasten: Steve Baskauf's blog is a great resource. He also did working hours for us using Vanderbot a couple years ago, and I think those resources are prob still linked from the working hour pages.

THANK YOU!

Session 4 (March 18) - Reporting Your Outcomes and Results

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In the movie Mad Max: Fury Road, War Boy and open linked data enthusiast Nux says, “Witness me, shiny and chrome!” This session will focus on reporting back on your project once it’s over. Various tools for data visualization and other ways to demonstrate the impact and outcomes of your project to administration and interested parties will be discussed. Again, these will not be deep dives into any one tool or platform in favor of providing a variety of options for attendees to select which suits them best.

Due to unforeseen circumstances, the fourth session of our Starting a Wikidata Project series, was not presented as a live session. Instead, we invited you to an asynchronous community Slack conversation using the materials prepared for that session by Eric Willey, and welcomed your online participation to complete the experience.

Information and questions were posted in our #wikidata channel in the LD4 Slack Space at our usual starting time on Tuesday, March 18, 2025 at 9am PT / 12pm ET / 17:00 UTC / 6pm CET (Time zone converter).

We're glad you joined us. We provided Eric's questions and ideas for some helpful resources. You provided great suggestions and discussion. We've added your thoughts from the Slack interchange to the series project page notes section for this session so that future community members starting their first project will have a good place to look for inspiration!

Invite to join LD4 Slack: https://join.slack.com/t/ld4/shared_invite/zt-31379okvn-8IVWvbCZerKnN352sKCa2g Find us on the #wikidata channel.

Notes (click "expand" on the right to see the notes)

STARTING WIKIDATA AT YOUR INSTITUTION

Session 4: Reporting Your Outcomes and Results

Hi, #wikidata, and welcome to today's Wikidata Affinity Group asynchronous community session! Eric Willey has led us through three scintillating live sessions of this project series on Starting a Wikidata Project, but due to unforeseen circumstances he is not available for a live session today. Because this has been such a dynamic and useful project series, one that we believe many will revisit in the future, we decided not to cancel this final discussion, but rather to move it online here. For the rest of today (and really forever, or until the discussion is deleted by our non-paid Slack) we hope you will engage in lively conversation. We will add the list of resources and ideas that we gleaned from Eric's unfinished slides, and then post three question prompts as discussion threads. Sometime tomorrow, we hope, we will transfer everyone's ideas and thoughts to the Notes section of session 4 on the project series page linked above. As you may know, when we have live calls, we usually ask people to sign in in some way. Now that we have started using project pages for our series, we invite you to add yourself to the list of participants. Since today's session is experimental, why not show that you are here today for the usual hour by adding an emoji. Pick any fun emoji or something that expresses your feelings on this Tuesday. Let's display our community with a whole pile of emojis!
Emojis included scottish_sheep, black_cat, seedling, duck, exploding head, fomo, European castle.

Here is the list of resources and ideas we gleaned from Eric's slides on how to report the outcomes and results of your Wikidata project:
Why are you doing this project?

Tools for collecting stats for reporting

Tools for visualizing data for reporting

Tools for publicizing your project

  • News stories (at your institution or elsewhere!)
  • Social media
  • Scholarly articles
  • Project pages

Feel free to add other tools/ideas here or to discuss your experience with any of these!

- To the point in another thread about "the story" of a project sticking with us, I'm very interested in Eric's concept here of the elevator speech.

- A fun demo of Wikidata Walkabout!

- I've found reporting statistics that demonstrate project impact quite a challenge. Examples of what I tried to measure are reported in https://eprints.lse.ac.uk/114976/ and https://eprints.lse.ac.uk/120224/ I'd love to know more about what others have done in this area.


Question 1: Have you used the Program and Events Dashboard for tracking and stats? What have you found valuable about it? Is there anything you wish it could do that it doesn't currently do?

- We used it at my institution for the PCC Wikidata Pilot, but didn't rely on it much for day-to-day activities. We kept our own spreadsheet on Microsoft Teams to divide up the things that we wanted to create items for among members of our team, as well as to track whether they were already in Wikidata or LCNAF, tools we used, etc. Overall, the Dashboard was useful when the project was complete, in that it presented a useful summary of how many items we had created or edited. But it was not used very much during the project itself. I don't know if we would even want to use it for project management purposes. It's easier to track it using other methods for our own workflows. But it it's useful in reporting statistics at the end of a project, so it does this part well.

- I like the spreadsheet approach a lot, too.

-I would find it really useful if the tool could track edits on separate projects during the same time period. I've used the dashboards, but with 3 different things going on during the same time period I found edits got tracked in every dashboard. I might be using the tool incorrectly, so would be interested if anyone had further advice.

Question 2: What tools do you like to use to visualize your data in Wikidata and what do you like about them?

-Thus far I use just the search links in wikidata (e.g. to show how many items are linked to a certain property)

- It's been a while, but I've used Scholia and EntiTree to visualize relationships between thesis advisors, their students, and specific dissertations. I like how Scholia presents them as knowledge graphs. EntiTree presents the relationships more as charts, which can be useful to showcase simpler relationships. I am referring to the "Academic Tree" feature within Scholia. This platform is also useful in presenting statistics, co-author graphs, and timelines, etc. But it's only useful depending how much of this data has been entered in Wikidata.

- I agree about Scholia--very useful! Also the caveat about it only picking up the data that's been entered in Wikidata (only a limited number of articles by our faculty can be found in Wikidata). Thus I'm reluctant to publicize it too much without a more comprehensive set of articles. We could enter articles via Zotero into Wikidata as long as it didn't cause a duplication problem.

-We've also used Scholia and EntiTree - and have also made use of Histropedia you can see a couple of examples under Images and Timelines here Wikidata:WikiProject_LSEThesisProject#Images_and_Timelines

Question 3: How have you publicized and/or shared your Wikidata project? How did you feel about reactions/outcomes to your reporting? Feel free to include links to your examples--we'd love to see them!

- Not personally, but I feel the projects which have most affected my outlook are not stats so much as narratives - for example the Witch project from Scotland or Darnelle's projects at UNLV. So it's not the numbers, but that one can connect and link disparate and seemingly unrelated ideas (especially apparent in the witch project)

- I agree

- Me too! Eric had shared this link to a project at his institution: https://news.illinoisstate.edu/2024/11/where-the-data-may-roam-bringing-wild-west-performers-to-wikidata/

- We publicised internally to the Library, the PhD academy, and the university as a whole. We also communicated to Alumni.

And here's a thread for YOUR questions. We can't promise answers, but we can try!

- More of a metaphysical or rhetorical question: Since Wikidata is so good for making links, how can we reach beyond our respective disciplines to excite others and enable people to build data connection across multiple disciplines?

- I love that question.

- You are so supportive!

- I feel like this is maybe the other end of that question, but will link again to an article Jackie Rubashkin shared: https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/TGDK.2.2.8

- Quote: We introduce an automated process that facilitates the generation of this art dataset, harnessing data from multiple sources (Artpedia, Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons) to ensure its reliability and comprehensiveness. Furthermore, our paper delineates best practices for the integration of art datasets, and presents a detailed performance analysis of general-domain entity linking systems, when applied to domain-specific datasets. Through our research, we aim to address the lack of datasets for NEL in the art domain, providing resources for the development of new, more nuanced, and contextually rich entity linking methods in the realm of art and cultural heritage.

- I think at institutions like academic ones, sharing Wikidata work outside the library--maybe that means getting bibliographers/curators/subject librarians interested so they can promote using Wikidata to the students/faculty they meet with, or hosting edit-a-thons on campus in a way that really demonstrates the value of the connections Wikidata makes.

If you have attended any or all of the sessions of Eric's project series, please feel free to add your thoughts on the series here. Did you find it helpful? Were there ideas that you felt you might try in the future? Was there any other theme you might like to see addressed?

- Myself, I loved the very practical approach Eric took toward planning a project and seeing it through without too much drama or unneeded effort. This would not be my natural method, so I learned a lot about not worrying too much or wasting time. I see the advice offered in this series as something I want to apply to life in general. Thank you, Eric!

- Even though I've been working in Wikidata for a few years, I still learned quite a bit and from these presentations. Plus Eric's humor made the sessions fun: "In the movie Mad Max: Fury Road, War Boy and open linked data enthusiast..."!

- We have not worked with Wikidata for a while since we finished our pilot project with the PCC. Now we are planning to get involved with creating Wikidata entities again for the PCC EMCO program. I think all of it has been useful for me to think about how we might approach this. I found the session on tools and gadgets to be useful as things we might explore as well.

-I think the biggest hurdle is selling your project to admin, so the first session was most valuable for me

Starting a Wikidata Project Etherpad
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https://etherpad.wikimedia.org/p/Starting_A_Wikidata_Project

FAQ

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How can I make sure I know about upcoming sessions?

How do we use the series Etherpad?
Our Etherpad is hosted by Wikimedia, and we are using it to take notes and keep track of questions and answers discussed during the sessions. After sessions are finished, we will update our series project page accordingly.

Collaborators

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Project Lead:

How to Add Yourself to the Participants Section

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First: make sure that you are LOGGED IN!

Then, simply typing four tildes (~), like this: ~~~~ below the numbered list, will automatically generate your signature and time stamp (if you would like to have your username appear after a bullet point, you can type * using the asterisk key before adding the tildes).

Alternatively, once you are in Edit mode, you can click on the four tildes below as seen in this image:

Screenshot of the insert sign your name feature
How to sign your name as a participant of this page

Participants

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