Wikimedia Conference 2017/Program/32

32: Wizards, Muggles and Wikidata: cooperation with external organisations

How to move forward

• 
  Jens & John presenting

What was this session about?

The session was mainly held to explore the ways, challenges and difficulties of importing data into Wikidata. Jens (as the Communications Strategist at WMDE working on promoting data donations for Wikidata) and John (Wikimedian in Residence at UNESCO) use the “Harry Potter” metaphor to explain data donation process in a simpler way.

What are the next steps to be taken?

The session was mainly meant to be an information and Q&A session, so there were no direct next steps planned. However, Jens called for a “documentation sprint” at the Wikimedia Hackathon to improve the documentation of Wikidata in general. You can find the process/outcomes of this sprint on Mediawiki.org.

Photos

see the Commons category

Slides

Google Presentation
(not transferable to Wikimedia Commons due to copyright issues)

Audience

Wikidata volunteers, coordinators working with external organisations including GLAMs, anyone wanting to import data into Wikidata

Session Format

Presentation

Length

60 min

Description

We present an outline of the cooperation between Wikidata and external organisations in the last year, with lots of magic. John will use his experience as a Wikimedia in Residence at UNESCO as an example for data partnerships.

As Wikidata compiles structured knowledge about the world, it needs contributors from all backgrounds, wizards and muggles alike.

Adding individual facts to Wikidata is often a simple process but adding the thousands, tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of facts in a large dataset manually is not practical. There are some tools and resources available to import data into Wikidata, but it is a complicated process requiring many different skills and steps which are often not well documented, making it something of a dark art. Non technical people can see the value in adding datasets to Wikidata but lack the technical ability to make it happen. This can leave us feeling like muggles and seeing the people able to import data like wizards.

Both muggles and wizards need to be able to work together, each contributing their own skills, experience and specialist knowledge in the same way Wikipedia articles are created. To help this to happen we have created a workflow and documentation to make it easier for people to collaborate on importing datasets. The documentation allows the Wikidata community to make decisions together, helping people to learn from previous data imports and progress in their technical skills and turn into wizards.

Desired Outcome

• Participants understand some of the possibilities of GLAM cooperation.
• Participants understanding the workflow of donating data
• Participants have an overview of the core tools and documentation available to make a data import happen.
• Participants understand how to make a data import request.

Speakers

John Cummings (Wikimedian in Residence at UNESCO), Jens Ohlig (WMDE)

Documentation

Jens and John used the whole time of the session (60’) for their presentation. Due to copyright issues (Harry Potter,...) the slides can’t be transferred to Wikimedia Commons, but you can check them out as a Google Presentation. The slides are pretty self-explainable, so there was no need for the detailed transcript/documentation of the session. There was no time for questions. During the session both speakers gave out a leaflet about the “Wikidata Import Hub”.