Wikipedia can shape the world, not just reflect it, according to research by panelist Neil Thompson, director of the FutureTech project at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

“Our experimental studies about Wikipedia have demonstrated the ways Wikipedia content makes its way into other knowledge production systems,” said Thompson, who led randomized control trials to examine the impact of Wikipedia content on scientific publishing and case law. In both studies, Thompson’s findings were clear: Wikipedia content influences real-world decisions and behaviors – in the case of his research, the decisions made in a court of law or in the development of scholarly publications.

“Because of Wikipedia’s scope, and how it is used and trusted, it has a lot of effect on the world,” said Thompson. “It’s pretty exciting, but it also speaks to the importance of getting the content as right as we can.”

Panelist Kai Zhu’s own research curiosities led him to explore how editing Wikipedia articles generates more attention paid to those articles and related articles, and the role of hyperlinks in driving this process.

“Wikipedia is not only a collection of textual content, but it is also a network of knowledge,” said Zhu, an assistant professor at Bocconi University, who emphasized the importance of the hyperlink structure of Wikipedia. “When there is a new link created, not only will more people read the linked article, but it also brings more content contribution because of that visibility.”

When panelist Shira Klein jumped into a Wikipedia talk page discussion in 2018, she never predicted it would lead to a two-year collaborative research study and a subsequent publication with nearly 55,000 views and counting. 

“The skirmish [on the talk page] was the tip of the iceberg,” said Klein, associate professor of history at Chapman University, who joined a debate between editors to support the citation of “Fear: Anti-Semitism in Poland after Auschwitz,” a book published by Princeton University Press and Random House in 2006. This experience led Klein to discover a group of editors working systematically to simplify and distort Holocaust history on the English-language Wikipedia.

In her research, Klein found that misleading information about Jews in Poland has been added to Wikipedia despite its policy violations, noting how the organized efforts of groups of editors to maintain the misinformation can lead to unchecked distortions in articles.

Along with her co-author, Klein studied 25 public Wikipedia articles and nearly 300 back pages, including noticeboards, arbitration cases, and talk pages. Together with interviews with editors and statistical data from Wikipedia, the analysis demonstrated how the addition of content that violates Wikipedia policies can evade scrutiny, leading to distortions and misinformation.

“One thing I’m curious about is what other areas on Wikipedia have this burning issue,” said Klein. “Is there a correlation between the amount of disinformation on a topic and the amount of dispute it has triggered on Wikipedia?”

For more than ten years, panelist Rosta Farzan has studied the social experience of new Wikipedia editors, including why people begin to edit and what helps them not only continue to edit but also contribute higher quality content to articles. According to Farzan’s research, intentional socialization practices for new editors can lead to their long term engagement with Wikipedia. 

Farzan, an associate professor in the School of Computing and Information at the University of Pittsburgh, emphasized the positive impact of the structure and support provided by Wiki Education’s Wikipedia Student Program. 

“The students feel proud of working on Wikipedia articles,” said Farzan. “Newcomers who join through classes are more likely to continue editing on Wikipedia compared to other comparable newcomers. They write more, they write better quality, and they stay on Wikipedia longer.”

Interested in hearing more from the panelists and other featured scholars? Catch up on our Speaker Series programs on YouTube and be sure to join our next webinar, “Wikipedia and Education, globally”, on Tuesday, May 14, 10 am PDT / 1 pm EDT.

For our fourth and final webinar celebrating Wikidata’s birthday, Hilary Thorsen, Julian Chambliss, Kate Topham, and Justin Wigard each shared how they invite newcomers into the linked open data fold. What does Wikidata allow that other platforms don’t? What advice do they have for getting people started? And what do we mean when we say we’re building a “community of practice”?

Hilary got her start with Wikidata as Wikimedian-in-Residence for the Linked Data for Production Project. While there, she helped library colleagues advance their own projects and had fun answering their linked data questions. She decided to capture that expertise and disseminate it even more widely through the LD4 Wikidata affinity group and has been doing so since April 2019.

Justin is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Distant Viewing Lab at University of Richmond, where he works and teaches courses on comics and popular culture. For Justin, Wikidata provides fruitful ways of thinking about community engagement and facilitating open data work in the humanities classroom. He’s thinking about ways we can connect the dots between the classroom, the academy, and Wikidata’s global community of users.

Kate is a Digital Archivist at Michigan State University (MSU). She specializes in metadata, data migration, and digital collections. Kate got into Wikidata as a form of data cleaning through her work in Open Refine, which she utilizes so often she refers to it as her “software spouse.” She’s interested in using Wikidata for research and making things that are hidden more visible to everyday people.

Julian is a professor of English and the Val Berryman Curator of History at the MSU Museum at Michigan State University. He leads the Department of English Graphic Possibilities Research Workshop, a group that brings comic studies faculty and graduate students together to contribute to Wikidata. Justin and Kate have contributed extensively to Graphic Possibilities–Justin as a recent PhD graduate of MSU and Kate in her archivist role. Together, the group is creating a data set from MSU’s library of comic art metadata collection to share with the world.

What Wikidata allows that other platforms don’t

In Wikidata, you can describe collection items in more depth and nuance, disrupting library authority and traditional modes of collaboration. The possibilities are endless when you can crowd-source corrections to your data and share results with an audience that spans the globe.

Julian, Justin, and Kate often consult Wikipedia to fill in missing data in their catalogs, which is how they found their way to Wikidata. They appreciated the abundance of information already in the repository, but also saw the gaps. Filling them was a worthwhile pursuit, not only for the project but for the many researchers that would come after them. “We began to think of Wikidata as a means of providing that information about comics that would really enhance peoples’ ability to write about them,” Julian said. Wikidata allows you to provide detail and nuance to an item in an unparalleled way. That freedom was an attractive feature for Hilary, too. “With Wikidata, the sky’s the limit,” she added. “And you can find anything that interests you and add it if it’s notable enough. I found that exciting.”

Julian is curious about how we can make nuances around culture more visible in a data record. Wikidata is useful in surfacing the omissions in a record, especially related to race and gender. “We can’t change the library record [to be more inclusive],” Julian noted. “But we can do something in Wikidata that has a substantive impact in peoples’ ability to understand what the record is showing, or what it doesn’t show. Questions of race and metadata are linked in a way that’s a challenge, but it’s something we have to wrestle with.”

Other Wikidatans can help. As the Graphic Possibilities team were combing their collection, they discovered some errors in their bibliographic data. “All our Marmaduke comics were attributed to the wrong person. And that same problem existed in a lot of places,” Kate said. “By bringing together this community in Wikidata we could figure out where the errors were and that community of knowledge and practice allowed for us to improve.”

“I love the way Wikidata disrupts library authority,” Kate continued. “We can incorporate different expertise and ways of seeing the world. The way we structure things is better because we can draw on so many different communities.”

Wikidata is a tool for examining topics in new, multidisciplinary ways. Justin invites his humanities students to create visualizations about comics in the platform, where they see the instant ramifications of their work. “They think about how their work extends beyond the classroom, beyond the gated silo of academia. And for me, I can connect with colleagues I didn’t know before. It’s not just linked data, it’s linked people.”

The value of the Wikidata community has been a through-thread across our Speakers Series. “Before, cataloging had been internal and focused only on what I was working on at my institution,” Hilary shared. “But with Wikidata it becomes so much easier to collaborate with people around the world and contribute to other projects and learn something new. It broadens the way you can contribute and it’s a more accessible practice too. You can start participating in linked data immediately, which before was really hard to do. Overall, the community is what drew me to Wikidata and what makes all the contributions so worthwhile and keeps me coming back.”

Wikidata as a “community of practice”

Wikidata provides a forum for anyone to participate in discussions around data integrity. With archives of past discussions, decisions are transparent and up for friendly debate. And Wikidatans share a deep interest in adapting until we get it right. As the Graphic Possibilities team said more than once, it’s a community of practice.

Given that the platform can be a little overwhelming at first, it’s important to give newbies different modes of entry and participation. “That’s more sustainable for the long run,” Hilary said of her work with LD4. “People don’t always have time to join every call or working hour, but because we have consistent programming, people know that if they miss a week they can join the next week.” Justin, who helps lead Wikidata edit-a-thons with Graphic Possibilities, noted that the platform was great for both synchronous and asynchronous work as the pandemic forced them to transition to remote work. “We had to try to find ways to reach folks who were not fluent in comics or Wikidata or might not be digital experts, but still wanted to be part of a community.”

When asked what was most helpful in building community around the Graphic Possibilities project, Kate thought of two things. “Hilary Thorsen and Will Kent,” Kate said with a smile. “There’s so much within Wikidata and Wikipedia that we joke about satisfies the need for nerds to correct each other. And I feel like both of you have provided a model for this very generous, opening space that makes working with linked data, and Wikidata in particular, a lot easier. This whole thing is a big conversation and we get to decide what the best way forward is.”

Advice for bringing others into linked data

The Graphic Possibilities team has successfully invited comics-interested scholars from across institutions to join them in edit-a-thons and build their own capacity around linked open data. Having scaffolded events with clear, narrowly defined goals is helpful in fostering this community of learning. “It’s easy to get lost in the weeds, so we set firm boundaries about what to work on, what to avoid, and we have really clear tutorials and troubleshoot issues,” Justin shared. “Wikidata can be overwhelming if you’re not prepared for it. Having that support is helpful. And recognizing that smaller goals can be just as effective as something lofty. We actually started to scale our projects back so we can achieve more with less.”

Preparation is also key. Keep events focused and small, but have a back-up plan for what to work on in case you finish early. And be prepared to let people pursue their interests. “Allowing for creativity within your scoped event can be powerful and fun,” Kate added.

The future of Wikidata

Wikidata has grown so much over the last 10 years – it just hit 100 million items this year. We only see it becoming more important to library curricula, job training, and the World Wide Web as a whole.

“It’s a necessary skill,” Hilary said. “Five years from now, you’ll want to have that on your resume.”

“Wikidata and other open source repositories are going to become increasingly necessary and relevant as other avenues of data become more monitored, privatized, siloed,” said Justin. “There’s something really powerful and amazing about Wikidata and the fact that it’s grown so much over 10 years. … I want to see more of that, more projects, in more classrooms. I want to see what other people do with it that I haven’t thought about.”

“Understanding data becomes a fundamental question of civil society,” Julian added. “I’m no Wikidata expert, but I do recognize the tremendous potential in Wikidata to support really interesting conversations. How does a data description actually translate to how society operates? How do we tell stories with data? Students at some level have been born consumers of technology but explaining how it works is a real problem for them. Data especially is particularly complicated for them. I’ve said, you know, these platforms aren’t actually free. The thing they’re selling is you. If you don’t have a sense of data literacy, you’re going to be in trouble. If you get a little sense of it, you begin to understand that data is intrinsically connected to your life.”

Check out LD4 here and Graphic Possibilities here. 

If you’re the kind of learner who seeks community and guidance on your journey, the Wikidata Institute has three upcoming training courses starting in January, March, and May 2023.

So far, we’ve covered the state of Wikidata and cultural heritage 10 years in and what you need to know to kickstart a Wikidata Initiative of your own. Last week, Will Kent brought additional experts together to reflect on scaling and sustaining Wikidata work within cultural institutions. Dr. Anne Chen, an art historian and archaeologist, joined us from the International (Digital) Dura-Europos Archive. Ian Gill is a Collections Information Systems Specialist at SFMOMA. Dr. Stephanie Caruso is a Giorgi Family Foundation Curatorial Fellow at the Art Institute of Chicago. Previously, she was a Postdoctoral Fellow in Byzantine Art/Archaeology at the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, where she worked with Bettina Smith, the current Manager of Image Collections and Fieldwork Archives. All four speakers completed a course through our Wikidata Institute at some point in the last three years, and we’ve loved watching their Wikidata Initiatives grow.

What does Wikidata allow that makes it unique from other platforms? 

For Anne, Wikidata provides an opportunity to collaborate across continents and languages in a way she and her archaeological colleagues have never been able to do. She can draw together disparate artifacts and rebuild archaeological contexts virtually. And because Wikidata’s interface is set up for translation into many different languages, Anne and her team can invite their global colleagues to interact with their records, some of whom will have access to these records in their native language for the very first time. “Because of the democratic nature of Wikidata, we can pull additional people from all over the world into the conversation about linked open data at a relatively early stage.”

For Bettina, Wikidata is the place where Dunbarton Oaks’ collections can compare and contrast similar collections around the world. “That kind of aggregated search has been tantalizingly promised by linked open data for so many years,” said Bettina. “Wikidata is the first real manifestation of it.”

New research is possible from there, which is what Stephanie is particularly excited about. “With Wikidata you can work with much broader data in one consolidated place,” she said. “The questions you can ask of the material wouldn’t be possible if you had to go to each archive. That would be way too much work and too slow going.” When she and Bettina began cataloging collections of Syrian origin, they noticed that item names varied across different languages. Traditional repositories might ask to privilege one language over another. Not Wikidata. “Having a QID that is translatable between all these issues makes it possible to get a fuller depth of research.” And to that, Anne added: For how many generations have researchers been reinventing the same research? If someone can point to a Q number and no one has to do that work again, imagine! It’s easier to build on each other’s research if we don’t have to reinvent the wheel.”

At SFMOMA, Ian populates Wikidata records based on their permanent collection as part of the Artist Identities Project. Wikidata helps him represent artist information more ethically, generating metrics about who his institution exhibits and acquires each year, potentially informing the institutions’ future decisions. “A lot of museums are trying to do this work, and Wikidata is the central repository for it,” Ian said.

And it’s not just museums who are interested in improving linked open data. “I noticed there were Wikidata users that were enhancing our records, saying ‘oh this exhibition actually went to this other venue too.’ I could then add that information to our records. It’s cool to interact with others with the same goals.” It goes both ways. When institutions make improvements to Wikidata, that information has the potential to start a ripple effect. And in return, the institution benefits from access to a more complete repository. “The idea that content generated by amazing editors within the Wikidata community could be reabsorbed into a collection database and used for collection ends in the future is really exciting,” Anne added.

Editing Wikidata is also personally satisfying. Seeing your work out there with immediate effects is metadata’s version of instant gratification! “And it challenges the paradigm that your work has to go through and be checked by traditional levels of authority,” Will chimed in. “I forget sometimes that doing something for the first time, having attained this new skill, is something tangible, compelling, and addictive,” Anne added. “It’s a rush!” Bettina added with a smile.

How did they convince others at their institution to support them?

Most of us are new to editing, and even as we learn, Wikidata evolves. So how do you convey the opportunities it presents to your institution if it’s not a static platform and the possibilities are limitless? For Anne, learning enough of the basics to convey the value of a larger project was huge. “As an art historian and archaeologist, I went into the linked open data sphere feeling uncomfortable in my technical knowledge,” she said. “So I had to start at the beginning and develop content in Wikidata that I could use to demonstrate the promise. Ultimately the thing that got traction was not just talking about abstract ideas, but pointing to a case study. From there, I can talk about all the things I haven’t done yet and how this could be better if we all contributed to it and if we had buy-in from the institution to go full scale.” And once she and her team had a case study, they were able to apply for larger scale funding from the National Endowment of the Humanities–which they received!

Although Wikidata is a strategic fit for cultural institutions, many are hesitant about participating in an open platform where anyone can change anything. Stephanie had some ideas for calming nerves: “I tell them, ‘You already did a good job creating a stable URL for each object in the collection. If someone clicks on it through Wikidata, they will go to your website. There’s a unique property for a Met ID, something that links back to the Met’s site and the owners’ explanation of the object. That can reassure people that regardless of what’s happening on Wikidata, you’re not changing the authority of the institution.”

Presenting a “handbrake option” can also be reassuring. “Anything on Wikidata that is erroneous or disputed can be reverted,” Anne shared. “I’ve also found it useful to talk about the history of the edits that have been made to a particular object on Wikidata. Thinking from an archival perspective, the idea that there’s a record that there was a dispute about an object is an important facet for the next generation and for thinking about how we can more responsibly engage with multiple perspectives with the content we’re managing.” “It’s also worth making the point that if you don’t do it, someone else could,” Bettina added. “And they might not do it the way you would do it.”

What are the key elements for sustaining a project?

According to our speakers, the main elements for success are some combination of the following: Passion. Supervisor support for your time. Other colleagues’ help. Funding opportunities are also nice. And above all else, expertise and continual learning.

“The Wikidata Institute is probably the best possible resource,” Bettina shared. “There’s also things like LD4, the Wikidata interest group that meets every other week. And I’m a member of ARLIS, the Art Library Society of North America, and they have a Wikidata interest group that meets once a month. Those are useful ways to find out about tools and things that I would not otherwise have known about.” “Going through lists of tools that people have developed is also cool. That’s how I found QuickStatements!” Ian added. “I’ll also put in a plug for discussion pages and the Wikidata telegram channel,” Anne said. “As a new user I was a little intimidated about revealing my ignorance on certain issues or how to do certain things. But at Will’s encouragement, and as part of the course, we got to realize that everyone is learning something and the community is helping each other grow.”

How do they see Wikidata influencing their field in the next 5 or 10 years? 

Anne sees promise in the multilingual collaborative nature of Wikidata and the effect that it could have for equity in her field at large. “I’m doing work that deals with cultural heritage material from Syria and I would love to partner with other institutions and offer Wikidata trainings. The payoff of that could be huge. For a project like mine, we could get more diverse perspectives looking at the content that we’re creating.”

Ian pointed out that there’s a lot more internal work to be done within cultural institutions to make things public. “I expect wider adoption of Wikidata in five years for sure. In terms of the Artist Identities Project, a lot of other museums are working on that and it has come up in meetings where people say, ‘What if there were a central repository we could pull from?’ And I get to say, ‘That exists! It’s Wikidata!’”

“Innately as a librarian, archivist, and reformed cataloguer, Wikidata just makes sense,” Bettina added. “I didn’t know it existed before two years ago and now I’m presenting on it! I’m seeing that rapid increase in interest in a lot of my library colleagues and other institutions and I think it’s just gonna grow exponentially from here. If there are any cataloguers in the audience, you can do it—I promise!”

Check out Ian’s project here, Bettina and Stephanie’s here, and Anne’s here and here. 

If you’re the kind of learner who seeks community and guidance on your journey, the Wikidata Institute has three upcoming training courses starting in November, January, and March.

After checking in on the state of Wikidata and cultural heritage last week, this week we wanted to explore how a Wikidata initiative comes into being. What possibilities do catalogers and metadata librarians see in Wikidata? How do they convince their institutions to get excited about it, too? And how can anyone start a Wikidata Initiative of their own? That’s what we aimed to find out in the second event of our Wikidata Birthday Speaker Series. “Wikidata Will” Kent gathered Joe Cera from Berkeley Law Library, Kiley Jolicouer, a Metadata Strategies Librarian at Syracuse University Libraries, and Chris Long, the Director of the Resource Description Services Team at University of Colorado Boulder Libraries.

What problem was your institution trying to solve with Wikidata?

Our panelists each found Wikidata in a different way. Joe’s repository didn’t use a common identifier and wasn’t easily editable. He wanted a system where he could assign a consistent authority across data items and make it easier to identify them in the repository.

Kiley’s team was migrating from a local digital collection system to a new digital asset management system. The new system didn’t have a native authority control capability, so she was looking for other methods of authority control and a way to integrate her team’s information with the cataloging department.

For Chris, his department was already interested in transitioning to open linked data. Plus, as his team’s director, he wanted a project big enough to give 12 people linked data experience, while also producing some real results that would bring value to the institution at large. In all three of these cases, Wikidata provided their solution.

How did you get buy-in at an institutional level?

“I found myself wondering, ‘Why isn’t everyone doing this?’ It’s an easy way to make your own information accessible to other people.”

One of the biggest draws of Wikidata is its ability to make massive amounts of data public like never before. Compared to other platforms, the interface is user-friendly and accessible. A self-proclaimed “low-tech poster boy”, Chris shared that he believes contributing to Wikidata is really something anyone can do with a little preparation. “I would love to convince more and more librarians that linked data and Wikidata aren’t that hard,” Joe added. “We just have to jump in and do it. To show people that there’s this real benefit to the profession generally and to institutions, too, to be engaging with it. You don’t have to be comfortable with technology. You just have to be willing to jump in.”

“Because there’s such a low barrier to entry, there have been a lot of opportunities to pull in other people who are not familiar with Wikidata,” Joe continued. “They can clearly see the connections in my project, even if they’re not comfortable interacting with the data. The ability to include other people at any step of the process has been really useful. I found myself wondering, ‘Why isn’t everyone doing this?’ It’s an easy way to make your own information accessible to other people.” Joe’s internal goal–defining common identifiers for his own repository–had external implications. That data was ready to be shared! “When it was time to use resources, we had already set ourselves up to add value to Wikidata.”

Wikidata is not only low-barrier and low-risk, but even the smallest contributions have big pay-offs. “The fact that you’re contributing to both the institutional value and to a global information community is compelling,” Kiley shared. “It’s so much bigger than the specific project you run. You’re creating something that will persist and snowball into something bigger. Once information is created on Wikidata, a little bit more gets added, then a little bit more and more, and then it’s so much bigger than what you started with. The net gain of it is enormous.”

There’s something to be said for engaging with the public and de-siloing collections in this new, far-reaching way. “As a cataloger or metadata librarian, you know people are seeing what you’re producing but you don’t necessarily see them seeing it,” Kiley pointed out. “But with Wikidata and Wikipedia, you can see that participation where people either challenge what you said or add to it. You see the ecosystem from a very different point of view.”

Kiley had used information from Wikidata before, but Wiki Education’s Wikidata training course was what prepared her to contribute to the repository herself and use it in a new way. Preparing data to be added to Wikidata did require upfront work, but Kiley says the possibilities are worth it. “With the way our linked data is structured, moving it over requires us to be more specific about it. But that also gives us the ability to make all that data publicly accessible, allowing users to query it in a way that’s different from just searching in the digital collections.”

For Chris, on the other hand, his Wikidata Initiative was a natural progression from existing linked data projects at his institution. “I was able to get that buy-in from the other catalogers, who saw it was an extension of something they had been doing for a long time.” After taking Wiki Education’s intro to Wikidata course, Chris then had the tools to bring others along with this new system. “I could show them that hey, this linked data thing is not so scary. And we’re beginning to see how we can use this in our production environment. Wikidata enables you to code in relationships that other platforms don’t allow you to do. The querying feature is so powerful that you can find relationships that you might not be able to otherwise.”

The challenge, he said, wasn’t convincing his team that Wikidata is valuable. Instead, it was getting them (and himself!) to think outside of their typical workflow. “I had to say, ‘There are so many more things that we can put in a Wikidata item than a NACO record.’ But NACO records have very stringent rules, while Wikidata is a little bit of the ‘Wild West’ for metadata. Giving ourselves the freedom to do these things is a mindshift. I found myself encouraging my folks saying, we don’t have to do the same things we did in NACO records. Let’s embrace all the possibilities we can.”

Wikidata presents an opportunity to think outside the box and beyond the closed systems many of us are accustomed to working within. “It’s clear that everyone on Wikidata has a different way of approaching the same thing,” Joe pointed out. “It depends on where you’re coming from.” And through the systems of consensus-building that Wikidata is known for, we arrive somewhere great together.

I want to start a Wikidata Initiative. What do I do?

“When doing any kind of project, but especially a project that’s dealing with data, it has to be iterative,” Kiley pointed out. “You’re going to find stuff that you did that you absolutely hate, that didn’t work, or isn’t quite working well enough. You have to be willing to backtrack. Whether it’s working in Wikidata itself or a local instance of Wikibase, that willingness to understand that even if you’re already familiar with what you’re doing, there’s still a learning curve with everything. There’s going to be adaptive decisions along the way.”

Chris had some advice of his own. “When you’re starting out, you have to decide at the beginning, what’s the scope of the project? How many resources do you have? Don’t try to take on too much for your initial project. Keep it small. The thing I like about Wikidata is that you don’t have to do everything. Other people can add information to your items. Wikidata items beget other Wikidata items. You don’t have to take on the whole world with your project, just try to learn and realize you’re not going to get it right the first time. You can go back and fix it as you learn more things. It’s a learning journey.”

And there are resources to help you learn. Above all else, you’re not alone. For Kiley, the best resource is other people. “The whole community–constellations of people working in different areas on different things–is really invaluable, regardless of what you’re trying to do. They’re so friendly and so helpful and willing to weigh in on ideas, whether it’s offering something you haven’t even considered or just helping you solve a problem that you can’t figure out on your own.”  Joe chimed in too: “I expected someone to say, ‘You don’t know what you’re doing!’” But they didn’t. Instead, Joe benefited from the wisdom of other Wikidatans while working in a public space, free of a silo.

“You can contribute to Wikidata without being responsible for the frankly massive undertaking of having the information be as complete as possible,” said Kiley. “I think people misunderstand that as a weakness of Wikidata, that it’s not ‘complete,’ but I think that’s what makes it such a wonderful opportunity.”

“I’m actually creating, I’m not just experimenting,” Chris added. “And I can share that. It’s hard to demonstrate what value your cataloging team is adding. You know you’re doing it, but it’s hard to make it visible and understandable to others on campus. Wikidata is one way to show that you’re adding value to the campus community. To me, that’s what’s exciting.”

In five years, Chris sees Wikidata being even more incorporated into the production environment, especially with the Library of Congress incorporating it. Kiley hopes to see more discussion of both Wikidata and Wikipedia in the context of information literacy and data literacy. Really, the possibilities are endless. Sure, the “choose your own adventure” nature of Wikidata can be a bit overwhelming (thanks Joe for the apt phrase). But there’s also beauty in that freedom. As a Wikidatan, you’re a data wrangler in the Wild West of metadata. And that’s pretty cool.

Check out Kiley’s project here; Joe’s project here; and Chris’ projects here, here, and here.

Interested in choosing your own adventure, but don’t know where to start? Wiki Education has a vision for the future, too: that all librarians, archivists, museum professionals, and other linked data enthusiasts can participate in Wikidata with as few barriers to entry as possible. If you’re the kind of learner who seeks community and guidance on your journey, , the Wikidata Institute has three upcoming training courses starting in November, January, and March. Consider also signing up for our next 2 webinar events celebrating Wikidata’s birthday all of October.

• The State of Wikidata and Cultural Heritage: 10 Years In
  • Tuesday October 4, 2022 — Watch the recording on Youtube or read our summary blog.
    
  • We’ll learn how Wikidata is (or is not) integrated into Wikipedia, how it helps an enormous cultural institution like the Smithsonian achieve its goals, and how Kelly Doyle, Andrew Lih, and their colleagues at the Smithsonian work to keep a Wikidata Initiative going. Lane Rasberry also joins us from the University of Virginia as the Wikimedian-in-Residence at the School of Data Science!

• What You Need to Know to Kickstart a Wikidata Initiative
  • Thursday Oct 13, 2022 —Watch the recording on Youtube or read our summary blog.
    
  • We’ll hear from Wikidata’s biggest fans: librarians. Namely, Joe Cera from Berkeley Law Library, Kiley Jolicouer, a Metadata Strategies Librarian at Syracuse University Libraries, and Chris Long, the Director of the Resource Description Services Team at University of Colorado Boulder Libraries. They’ll each share how they got involved with Wikidata at their respective institutions, how Wikidata projects align with libraries’ missions, and how you can start a Wikidata Initiative at your institution, too!

• Scaling and Sustaining a Wikidata Initiative
  • Thursday Oct 20, 2022 — Watch the recording on Youtube or read our summary blog.
    
  • You’ve got a vision for a Wikidata Initiative that will amplify your work and make Wikidata more equitable and more complete. You may know how to get started, but how will you keep it going? Or foster community around this work? What does your institution need to do in order to support your Wikidata work? Join Bettina Smith from Dumbarton Oaks, Stephanie Caruso from the Art Institute of Chicago, Anne Chen of Dura-Europos and Bard College, and Ian Gill from SFMOMA. Let’s dive into what makes their projects successful. Their experiences may spark ideas for you as you develop your own Wikidata Initiative.

• The Future of Data: A Community that Grows Together Stays Together
  • Tuesday Oct 25, 2022 — Watch the recording on Youtube or read our summary blog.
    
  • For our final birthday celebration, we’re looking to the future. Speakers Julian Chambliss, Kate Topham, Justin Wigard, and Hilary Thorsen are out there building Wikidata community. We want to know where they envision this work going over the next few years. What kinds of insights do they want their communities to have from their Wikidata Initiatives five years from now, and how do they approach their projects to achieve this?

We hope these talks present a nice forum for connecting you not only with knowledge, but also with other attendees who can build community around an idea or project you may have. These free conversations will happen once a week over Zoom for one hour. We’ll also record and post the sessions online for you to view in the event of a scheduling conflict.

We hope you’ll be able to join us (virtually) and hear all of the insights these community members have to share about Wikidata and their projects. I can’t think of a better way to celebrate Wikidata than to show what an impact its made in all of these fields. See you soon!

Reach out if you have any questions: will@wikiedu.org

How do I know what topics my students should work on?

This is always a tough question. Not because there aren’t gaps out there, but because there are so many, it’s often hard to dial down. The first step is to review our Finding Articles orientation for instructors. This helps you understand how to navigate Wikipedia’s many article lists, WikiProjects, and assessment tables, to find articles related to your course topics. You can access this by logging into our Dashboard and reviewing our instructor orientation modules.

On top of the trainings, I also like to ask instructors to think about the level of students they’ll be working with. For a freshman or intro course, a biographies project can help instill research around course content while providing students a clear pathway to success. After all, each biography on Wikipedia is expected to have clearly defined sections that make it easy to understand how to present and verify information.

For higher level courses though, instructors often want more thematic topics. That’s where searching for key terms or phrases, or through WikiProjects and assessment lists on Wikipedia can be a great start.

Once you find ideas for your course, try verifying that the articles are in need of improvement by checking out its Talk page (found in the upper left of any article page). Is the article listed as a “stub-class” or “start-class” article? Great! Those are perfect for students to improve. Go ahead and add them to the Available Article list on your course page. Is the article “B-class” , “Good” , or “Featured”? Try finding a different, related topic with a little more room for expansion. And don’t forget that Wiki Education staff are always available to answer questions about finding articles or specific topics you might want students to work on.

Can my students work in groups?

Yes! And in fact, the Wiki Education Authorship Highlighting tool will be able to show you at the end of the term exactly what each student in a group has contributed to their project. Take the article about the broad form deed, a legal document that allows people to purchase rights to minerals and other resources below the surface of a property line. This is a new article created by students this Spring 2018 term, but how do you know what each student contributed? Using our authorship highlighting tool, you can see what the three assigned students each contributed, color coded to their username in either purple, red, or yellow. One student worked on the early history, another on the 1950s-80s, and another on the 90s leading into the end of the deeds use and the legacy of the split estate. Pretty cool! Our advice is that each student in a group is still required to take the trainings individually, but that they work together to select sections to draft individually, all leading into a lead section updated or written together, and with sources they’ve compiled together as well.

How long are the trainings?

Each week, students are assigned to take a training to develop the skills they need to complete that week’s assignment. Each training is designed to be less than 10 minutes of skill learning. For example, is this the week where your students are selecting their topics? If you’ve selected that they can choose their topics themselves, they will be assigned a short training that guides then through the article finding process. Is this week their peer review? Students are assigned a short training that guides them to where they should leave their comments (the answer: the Talk page of their peer’s Sandbox) and what they should be looking for during the review process.

The exception to this are the first two or three trainings, which help students build up their basic understanding of how Wikipedia works, what the policies are, and how to differentiate the different spaces on Wikipedia (what is a Talk page anyway?).

For more answers to our most common questions, feel free to log into our Dashboard, get set up as an instructor, and review our full instructor orientation.

And if you and your colleagues are interested in learning more together, we’d love to run an online workshop for your institution as well. Here’s what we’ll need if you’re interested:

• Someone on campus to organize and promote the event via listserves and emails to faculty
• A room on campus or online space for everyone to meet
• A date and time confirmed
• An interested group of instructors, no minimum attendance necessary (although more than 1 is probably a good idea!)

In a typical Wikipedia assignment, students research course content and update related articles on Wikipedia. One instructor from Santa Clara who joined us, Alberto Ribas-Casasayas, is trying this Wikipedia research assignment for the first time this spring in his SPAN 137 Introduction to Latin American Culture course. Students in Alberto’s class will be allowed to select their own topics (related to Latin American Culture), research that topic, and improve an existing Wikipedia article or create a new one from scratch if needed.

But for courses focused more on language practice than culture, we also provide assignment templates for translation projects. These ask students to identify content missing in their native language on Wikipedia, find an article in the language they are studying, and translate relevant text from one to the other. To read more about the work done by students in translation projects, check out our recent roundup.

While Wiki Education has only supported a few courses in translation projects, we would love to grow our work in this area and are excited about new instructors and students taking on this challenge.

To learn more, visit teach.wikiedu.org or contact us by emailing contact@wikiedu.org.

By increasing our visibility, more people are able to participate in our programs. Those people then tell their friends about their experiences and when those friends join, it helps us continue to grow and scale our work. More important than growing our own capacity, however, is that after each course we support, more people around the world are able to access higher quality information via Wikipedia. That’s why our Educational Partnerships and Outreach team is always looking to increase the visibility of teaching with Wikipedia.

On any given day, this work can mean traveling to conferences, hosting workshops, setting up informational phone calls, or simply just answering emails. We are always working to help others better understand our work! One day last week, I had the opportunity to meet with a group of local instructors here in the Bay Area and a group of instructors remotely on the far-away shores of the Florida Gulf.

While at California State University, East Bay, I spent an hour talking with faculty about the benefits of a Wikipedia assignment. I was joined by Jason Smith, Assistant Professor and Associate Chair in the Department of Health Sciences, who has been teaching in our Classroom Program since Fall 2017. Together, we answered questions from instructors about the time commitment for setting up this project, how to grade and assess students’ work, and the value (and hardship) of engaging experts in open access projects. (For more on these issues, check out our blog post about how “Setting expectations for your Wikipedia assignment” can positively impact student learning.)

But we can’t always visit each institution in person to answer these questions. That’s why we also spend time meeting virtually with potential instructors via our online workshops and webinars. After visiting CSU East Bay, I headed home to call in to a Teaching Discussion Group meeting at Florida State University. Instructors at FSU met in person, but I called in to share slides and answer questions about Wiki Education’s work. We were joined by Biological Science Faculty Member Hank Bass, who has been teaching in our program since Spring 2017. Hank and I answered questions from instructors about best practices for grading, and how the Dashboard can help instructors assess students’ work throughout the assignment. (For more on this, check out our recent post about “5 things you didn’t know the Dashboard can do“).

But even when we can’t meet with instructors online or in person, our resources are always available. If you want to learn more about our work, or get started setting up a course project of your own, check out teach.wikiedu.org or reach out at contact@wikiedu.org.

They already host a Wikipedia Visiting Scholar to improve the depth of work in their field. With this webinar they were hoping to broaden their approach and invite members to join Wiki Education’s Classroom Program. In this program, instructors assign their students to improve Wikipedia in areas related to the course topic. Students learn how Wikipedia works, complete a rigorous literature review, and synthesize that learning to update relevant articles on Wikipedia. To ensure success, Wiki Education provides staff support, free online trainings, assignment templates, and more.

You can view the recorded webinar here or on Youtube.

Thank you to the Deep Carbon Observatory for encouraging scientists to improve Wikipedia. If you’re an instructor interested in joining the Classroom Program, visit teach.wikiedu.org or email contact@wikiedu.org.

Header image and video: Webinar: Wikipedia in Higher Education, Deep Carbon, CC BY, via Youtube.