6. Wikidata

Wikimedia & Wikidata: Collaboration and authority data

SunoikisisDC Digital Approaches to Cultural Heritage: Session 6

Date: Thursday February 22, 2024. 16:00-17:30 GMT.

Convenors: Monica Berti (Leipzig University), Gabriel Bodard (University of London), Ilaria Bucci (Birkbeck University), Anne Hunnell Chen (Bard College)

Youtube link: https://youtu.be/0dLkGkNB9HI

Slides: Combined slides (PDF)

Outline

This session introduces Wikidata, a free and open community-edited Linked Open Data knowledge base that can be read and edited by both humans and machines. Wikidata serves (among other things) as the spine of the Wikimedia family of resources, most famously Wikipedia. We discuss the need for Wikidata, uses of Wikidata as a source of data and media, and address some of the considerations (including intellectual, social, technical and ethical) to be kept in mind when contributing or editing Wikidata content.

The second part of the session focusses on the ongoing International Digital Archive of Dura Europos (IDEA) and explores the potential of Wikidata and Wikimedia to represent information about places, objects, and texts from ancient sites like Dura-Europos in Syria. IDEA aims to reassemble and recontextualise archaeological data from the site, mainly preserved in archival documents at Yale University, in an internationally accessible LOD format.

Required readings

• Schmidt, S. C., F. Thiery, and M. Trognitz. 2022. “Practices of Linked Open Data in Archaeology and Their Realisation in Wikidata.” Digital 2(3): 333–64. https://doi.org/10.3390/digital2030019
• Thornton, K., K. Seals-Knutt, and A. Chen. 2023. “Dura-Europos Stories: Developing Interactive Storytelling Applications Using Knowledge Graphs for Cultural Heritage Exploration.” Semantic Web 14(2). Available: https://www.semantic-web-journal.net/system/files/swj3552.pdf

Further readings

• Tilmar Bayer (2015). "How many women edit Wikipedia?" Wikimedia Foundation Blog. Available: https://blog.wikimedia.org/2015/04/30/how-many-women-edit-wikipedia
• Blumenkron, A., Goodall, A. & Panesar, L. 2022. "Decolonising Wikipedia: opportunities for digital knowledge activism." Spark: UAL Creative Teaching and Learning Journal 5.1, 95-100. Available: https://sparkjournal.arts.ac.uk/index.php/spark/article/view/159
• Regine Heberlein. 2019. "On the Flipside: Wikidata for Cultural Heritage Metadata through the Example of Numismatic Description." IFLA WLIC 2019 - Athens, Greece - Libraries: dialogue for change in Session 206 - Art Libraries with Subject Analysis and Access. Available: http://library.ifla.org/id/eprint/2492
• Victoria Leonard & Sarah E. Bond. 2019. “Advancing Feminism Online.” Studies in Late Antiquity 3.1, 4–16. Available: https://hcommons.org/deposits/item/hc:23429/
• Pietro Maria Liuzzo, Andrea Zanni etal. (2014), "The EAGLE Mediawiki." In Information Technologies for Epigraphy and Cultural Heritage Proceedings of the First EAGLE International Conference (edd. Orlandi, Santucci, et al.). La Sapienza Università Editrice. Pp. 187–201. Available: https://www.eagle-network.eu/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/Paris-Conference-Proceedings.pdf
• Moore, Lucy & Nevell, Richard. 2021. "Race, gender, and Wikipedia: how the global encyclopaedia deals with inequality" Bulletin of the History of Archaeology 31 (1) http://doi.org/10.5334/bha-660 (A short piece in a special edition about inequality and race in the histories of archaeology)
• Orlandi, S. 2016. "Ancient Inscriptions between Citizens and Scholars: The Double Soul of the EAGLE Project." In Romanello M. & Bodard G, Digital Classics Outside the Echo-Chamber. London: Ubiquity Press. Available: https://doi.org/10.5334/bat.l
• Martin L. Poulter. 2017. "Probing Parliament(s) with Wikidata." Wiki Playtime 2017-02-07. Available: https://medium.com/wiki-playtime/probing-parliament-s-with-wikidata-8cdb54e5221b
• Martin Poulter & Waqas Ahmed. 2021. "Representation of Non-Western Cultural Knowledge on Wikipedia: The Case of the Visual Arts" (preprint). Available: https://www.preprints.org/manuscript/202104.0770/v1
• Alexander Stinson, Sandra Fauconnier & Liam Wyatt. 2018. “Stepping Beyond Libraries: The Changing Orientation in Global GLAM-Wiki.” JLIS.it 9.3, 16–34. Available: http://dx.doi.org/10.4403/jlis.it-12480
• Alexander Stinson, Sandra Fauconnier & Liam Wyatt. 2018. “Stepping Beyond Libraries: The Changing Orientation in Global GLAM-Wiki.” JLIS.it 9.3, 16–34. Available: http://dx.doi.org/10.4403/jlis.it-12480
• Neil Thompson & Douglas Hanley (2018). "Science Is Shaped by Wikipedia: Evidence From a Randomized Control Trial." MIT Sloan Research Paper No. 5238-17. (abstract)

Resources

• Wikidata Query Service
• Wikidata Help
• Wikidata: A Free Collaborative Knowledgebase
• Introduction to Wikidata: The Wikipedia of Facts
• Introducing Wikidata to the Linked Data Web
• Ontologies for Knowledge Graphs: Breaking the Rules

Exercise

Explore this query of Roman amphitheatres (link to the query):

1. From the link above, click the blue “play button” to run the query (see reference image below)
2. take a look at the results and compare the richness of the information represented (starting from the entries on Dura-Europos and Lyon, for instance).
3. after you have run the query, under the “play” button is a drop-down menu of vizualization options (see reference image below); try toggling the vizualiation from “Table” (default) to the following:
   1. image grid
   2. map
   3. graph builder (in this view, from the labels in the left tab, pull “COUNT” into the Y field under “positional”, and “countryLabel” into the X field under “positional” and toggle to a bar graph view in the drop-down next to “marks”
4. from the “Table” view, experiment with changing the language of the results: in line 3 of the SPARQL code, replace the “en” with another language code (try “fr” for French and “ar” for Arabic, for instance)
5. in the upper right hand corner of the Query Service, try changing the language of the Query Service interface

Optional: Full tutorial for Wikidata editing

• Create a Wikipedia account if you don't have one (if you have ever worked on Wikipedia, it is the same acct)
• Work through the Training modules
• For more detail on specific areas: Wikidata Tours (work through the "basics" sections, plus as many of the activities as you have time for with special preference for images, coordinates, and inception date)
• Once you have the basics, this tutorial will get you familiar with querying data in WD: Wikidata query service
• Resources on WD multilinguality:
  • Read sections on “general principles” and “ “site content”: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Help:Multilingual
  • Navigating Wikidata/User settings (read “language setting” section) https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Help:Navigating_Wikidata/User_Options#Language_settings

Now:

• Create a new WD item about yourself (recommended if you have published or have an ORCID #). For a list of possible statements, see Anne Hunnell Chen’s entry https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q124336812
• If you are multilingual, an easy way to begin contributing to Wikidata is to translate labels and brief descriptions for items that don’t yet have labels/descriptions in languages you know. Use this tool to find entities without labels in a specific language: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Special:EntitiesWithoutLabel