Wikipedia is a tremendous resource. It is also a biased resource, lacking in diversity in any number of ways. Wikipedia isn’t the only source that suffers from systemic bias – most collections do, whether it’s from an art museum, library, archive or elsewhere. Initiatives to improve representation within collections are becoming more commonplace, which is … Continued
Today is Wikidata’s ninth birthday — and what better way to celebrate than a conference? WikidataCon 2021 begins today! The conference spans three days (October 29–31), several tracks, and so many sessions, so we thought we would share a list of sessions that might be of interest to those of you in the GLAM and education sectors. Some … Continued
There’s a lot to Wikidata. The Wikidata Query Service (WDQS) is one of the most effective and efficient ways to help you make sense of all that data on Wikidata. This post will explore how you can use different kinds queries to get the most out of your Wikidata experience. Each different kind of query will include … Continued
How do you describe things? Consider what you’re reading right now. Is this a blog post? Is it an article? Is it just a collection of sentences? Or is it a series of thoughts? I recently wrapped up a successful machine learning project as part of a capstone project at the School Data Science at … Continued
In April 2021 I was invited to give a talk at the Graphic Possibilities Research Workshop (GPRW) in the Department of English at Michigan State University. The GPRW has an extensive collection of comic books, with more than 50,000 records starting in 1888. The aim of this workshop is to engage subject area experts with the goal … Continued
Have you ever come across a Wikidata item that looks like this: List of Nobel laureates in Physics? You notice the word “list” in the label of the item and you get excited to see a list of laureates on the page. But as you scroll, you find there is no list. There is just a … Continued
There are many different ways to contribute to Wikidata. Some of these ways involve manual edits, batch edits, and edits with tools. There are hundreds of Wikidata tools that serve many different purposes. One particularly useful tool is called Cradle. Cradle is a form-based tool users fill out to generate new Wikidata items. Forms are user-generated and are … Continued
Wikidata is 8! Let’s celebrate! In eight short years Wikidata has grown from a central repository for all language versions of Wikipedia, to an increasingly essential fixture of the internet. Wikidata endeavors to represent the world’s knowledge as linked data. Linked data is the connective tissue that brings life and context to concepts, web pages, … Continued
This fall, we’re celebrating the 10th anniversary of the Wikipedia Student Program with a series of blog posts telling the story of the program in the United States and Canada. Saying that Wikipedia has changed a lot over the past ten years is an understatement. One of the ways that Wikipedia has changed the most … Continued
