Wikidata and Libraries: Facilitating Open Knowledge

Book chapter preprint. Chapter published (2018) in "Leveraging Wikipedia: Connecting Communities of Knowledge" (pp. 143-158). Chicago, IL: ALA Editions.Libraries and archives are increasingly embracing the value of contributing information to open knowledge projects. Users come to Wikipedia—one of the best-known open knowledge projects—to learn about a specific topic or for quick fact checking. Even more serious researchers use it as a starting point for finding links to external resources related to their topic of interest. Wikipedia is just one of the many projects under the umbrella of the Wikimedia Foundation, a nonprofit charitable organization. Wikidata, for its part, is a sister project to Wikipedia. It stores structured data that is then fed back to the other Wiki projects, including Wikipedia, thus providing users with the most up-to-date information. This chapter focuses on Wikidata and its potential uses for libraries. We hope to inspire information professionals (librarians, archivists, library practitioners) to take the next step and start a conversation with their institutions and colleagues to free their data by contributing it to an open knowledge base like Wikidata

WikiCite: Wikidata as a structured repository of bibliographic data

Slides from our <i>WikidataCon 2017</i> talk on <b>WikiCite</b

WikiCite 2017 report

<div><b>WikiCite</b> is an initiative aiming to build <b>a comprehensive knowledge base of sources</b>, to serve the sum of all human knowledge. In 2017, we convened nearly 100 attendees from 22 countries in Vienna for our annual event, to discuss progress, community needs and technical challenges towards this vision. This report examines the impact, key milestones, and reach the WikiCite community has achieved over the course of the past year.</div><div><br></div

A glimpse into Babel: an analysis of multilinguality in Wikidata

Multilinguality is an important topic for knowledge bases, especially Wikidata, that was build to serve the multilingual requirements of an international community. Its labels are the way for humans to interact with the data. In this paper, we explore the state of languages in Wikidata as of now, especially in regard to its ontology, and the relationship to Wikipedia. Furthermore, we set the multilinguality of Wikidata in the context of the real world by comparing it to the distribution of native speakers. We find an existing language maldistribution, which is less urgent in the ontology, and promising results for future improvements.<br/

Enabling Open Science: Wikidata for Research

Wiki4R will create an innovative virtual research environment (VRE) for Open Science at scale, engaging both professional researchers and citizen data scientists in new and potentially transformative forms of collaboration. It is based on the realizations that (1) the structured parts of the Web itself can be regarded as a VRE, (2) such environments depend on communities, (3) closed environments are limited in their capacity to nurture thriving communities. Wiki4R will therefore integrate Wikidata, the multilingual semantic backbone behind Wikipedia, into existing research processes to enable transdisciplinary research and reduce fragmentation of research in and outside Europe. By establishing a central shared information node, research data can be linked and annotated into knowledge. Despite occasional uses of Wikipedia or Wikidata in research, significant barriers to broader adoption in the sciences or digital humanities exist, including lack of integration into existing research processes and inadequate handling of provenances. The proposed actions include providing best practices and tools for semantic mapping, adoption of citation and author identifiers, interoperability layers for integration with existing research environments, and the development of policies for information quality and interchange. The effectiveness of the actions will be tested in pilot use cases. Unforeseen barriers will be investigated and documented. We will promote the adoption of Wiki4R by making it easy to use and integrate, demonstrate the applicability in selected research domains, and provide diverse training opportunities. Wiki4R leverages the expertise gained in Europe through the Wikidata and DBpedia projects to further strengthen the established virtual community of 14000 people. As a result of increased interaction between professional science and citizens, it will provide an improved basis for Responsible Research and Innovation and Open Science in the European Research Area