Our first two Wikidata virtual courses wrapped up last week! Wikidata, the open linked data repository for Wikimedia projects, is growing in popularity with museums, cultural heritage institutions, and libraries. The professionals in our first two Wikidata courses have been bridging their library collections and Wikidata. The open data repository presents opportunities for library staff … Continued
“Contributing content to Wikidata has a ripple effect. It’s a great way for libraries to contribute our resources to a wide variety of communities and meet users where they already are. It also presents opportunities to facilitate a community’s involvement in, design of, and creation of information.” – participant of our July 2019 Wikidata workshop … Continued
Do you work with linked data or teach data literacy? Are you looking to increase the impact of your collections? Do you need new methods of gaining insights about your data and tools for visualizing those findings? Are you just curious about the open data movement? If you answered yes to any of the above, … Continued
In May I attended the LD4 (Linked Data For…) conference in Boston, MA at Harvard Medical Center. I was lucky enough to sit on the program committee which helped plan this event. This was the second LD4 conference — a Mellon-funded initiative to increase linked data use and production in libraries. There were many engaging sessions with … Continued
Like Wikipedia, Wikidata is a collaborative online community that organizes knowledge and presents it to the world for free. This global repository is important for so many reasons, chiefly among them that the data stored in Wikidata is machine readable. That means when you ask Alexa or Siri a question, it’s likely that the answer is coming … Continued
Why is Wikidata important to you? You may not know it yet, but Wikidata is very important to you. For years most people were suspicious or cautious about Wikipedia being a reliable source. Now the Library of Congress tracks items in Wikidata, making it an authority whose reliability has improved significantly in recent years. And … Continued
Only about 17% of biographies on Wikipedia are about women. That number is slowly changing thanks to WikiProject groups like Women in Red and Women scientists. Now, scholars who take our professional development courses are also helping close that gap. New courses that train scholars with the skills to make a difference on Wikipedia begin this month. One … Continued
Representing the history of voting rights on the world’s most-accessed source of information is a noble pursuit. And this group of scholars, professionals, and citizen archivists are up to the task. Using source materials from the National Archives, they will improve Wikipedia articles about the history of women’s voting rights in the United States in … Continued
Our new program trains scholars to improve Wikipedia articles in their areas of expertise. The 3-month online course (which meets virtually once a week) presents an opportunity for professional development and public scholarship, equipping scholars with the tools they need to expand the impact of research in their discipline. So far, cohorts are improving Wikipedia’s … Continued