10 Years of Wikidata – Part 2

Vera de Kok is a Dutch Wikipedian that goes by the username 1Veertje. She currently works at the National Library of the Netherlands as a Wikipedia specialist and has a long background in programming and working with open data.

She started contributing well over 10 years ago, but she’s been on Wikidata only for five years. «When I went to Wikimedia events and I spoke about what sort of edits I did – she remembers – I had been repeatedly told “hey, you should check out Wikidata.” But I was a bit hesitant to get into yet another Wikimedia project at first, even though what I was doing on Dutch Wikipedia involved a lot of data.» Her work at the time, in fact, was mainly focused on the lists of municipal monuments in the Netherlands: «we have around 400 municipalities in our country, and each of them has their own system, and so harmonizing those systems proved to be quite difficult.»

Her first import project on Wikidata, however, was not focused on the Netherlands. On the contrary, it came by accident while she was on her way to Wikimania 2017 in Montréal, Canada: «that year I didn’t get a scholarship to attend, but I wanted to attend anyway, so I paid for my own ticket. And in order to make it cheaper, I found a flight that had a stopover in Reykjavik, Iceland. So, I decided to extend my stay there for a couple of days. Of course, I went to take photos of the local monuments, and I came across this tree that was designated “Tree of the Year 2016.” During Wikimania, I looked into this further, and found the list of the Icelandic Trees of the Year since 1989, and I thought “this looks like a manageable list of heritage sites,” and so I did it.» And this even produced an article about the Trees of the Year in Icelandic: «I speak three languages – Dutch, German, and English – but I don’t speak Icelandic. Yet, I don’t have an article on German Wikipedia, but I do on Icelandic!» she says, laughing.

As always, work never ends on Wikimedia projects, so Vera started another import of data, one that was more intertwined with her other home project Wikimedia Commons on which she’s an admin since March 2012: «there was this series of little biographical booklets that were published between 1896 and 1914 by a Rotterdam publisher, each one with a photo and the biography of a famous person, all in public domain. So, I used my skills as a developer to scrape the biographical data of those persons, put it all together nicely in a spreadsheet, and then used OpenRefine to match that data with Wikidata. And in the end, I uploaded the pictures on Commons, created the necessary categories, and linked them all back to their Wikidata Items.» This connection is particularly felt as paramount for her: «Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons make such a good combination for contributing. Previously, I would upload batches of images from conferences I attended, or transfer them mainly from Flickr, but all those pictures would end up just sitting there, even when I tried my best to tag and categorize them properly. And now – she gleefully adds – having a category of pictures of a person linked to its proper Item makes it extremely more likely that an image would find its way to be shown in an article, even if just created.»

Moreover, language doesn’t seem to be much of a barrier for Vera when it comes to imports. «Icelandic is not the only language I don’t speak in which I have imported large datasets – she quips – I also imported data regarding the Santiago International Book Fair, the largest Chilean book fair. I created or matched all the Items of the “honored guests” of the Fair through Orator Matcher, a tool I created. And then, I somewhat “coordinated” my work with a local Chilean Wikipedian, who regularly attended the Fair and took many pictures. He worked fairly neatly, I must say, and I’ve put quite an effort into collecting all the categories he created that weren’t linked to Wikidata. And then, of course, I collected the data for the guests by scraping the Fair’s website – which is in Spanish, of course! So with a bit of Google Translate and a bit of intuition, I managed to do this import. It was a way, for me, to help represent the Global South – she adds – and to help Spanish Wikipedia grow.»

For the future, Vera hopes for a better integration with Wikipedia, but also for some very specific technical upgrades: «We need prettier references in Wikidata. The thing I want the most is a proper Citoid implementation, to make it possible to generate pretty references in VisualEditor. My new-q5 tool has an implementation that translates a reference into a QuickStatements data batch, but that’s far from perfect. Also, currently no Wikipedia has the ability to visualize a family tree based on Wikidata data: that would be so much nicer than the archaic way we use now.»

Sadik Shahadu, who goes by the nickname Shahadusadik, is a Ghanaian Wikimedian who is very active in Wikimedia outreach initiatives. He is the co-founder of the Dagbani Wikimedians User Group and the Global Open Initiative, as well as the West African Indigenous Language Coordinator for the Art+Feminism User Group.

«I started as a community organiser – he says – organising Art+Feminism campaigns every year, and most of those were centred on improving Wikidata Items for notable Ghanaian women in sports, academia, politics, and many, many other fields. As far as I remember, my first edit on Wikidata was, in fact, during one of these campaigns in 2016, shortly after I joined the Wikimedia movement.»

His first big Wikidata project, though, came three years later, when in 2019 he and other editors started the Parliament of Ghana working group on Wikidata as a sub-project of Wikiproject Ghana: «the purpose of the project was to discover more about our Ghanaian parliamentarians’ history, starting from 1951,» when Ghana was still a British colony under the name of Gold Coast, «as well as discover more about our common history, especially after the independence.» Since independence was declared in 1957, Ghana went through several different constitutional periods, in some cases marked by military coups d’etats. Currently Ghana is in its “Fourth Republic,” that started in 1993 with the end of the previous one-party state political system. «Each period had its own Parliament system, so we needed to differentiate between them,» Sadik explains.

The project was funded through a WMF grant, requested by Global Open Initiative: «it was a huge project, one of the biggest we undertook that far. We recruited about 10 volunteers in the community, and each was assigned data collection tools and some tasks, like visiting libraries across the country, to collect data, resources, references to be reused in updating or creating the Items. We also sent an invitation to the Parliament of Ghana – Sadik recalls – which provided us with the Voter Registrar, that had all the information we needed: date of birth, constituency, educational and professional background, and all of that.»

The main reason why Sadik and the other Ghanaian editors who helped him embarked on such a project was, of course, to fill an existing gap, but not just that: «you know, these people have done so much for the country, so when we realized that most of them were not covered by Wikipedia or Wikidata, we made sure to have them documented. We did that so that people can learn more about them, about what they did, before, during, and after they were in Parliament,» he explains.

Wikidata has become a fundamental part of every activity of the Global Open Initiative first, and the Dagbani Wikimedians UG after: «every time we organize a campaign or workshop, we always try to include Wikidata. We never focus on just one project: even when we are working on Wiki Loves Monuments, we don’t focus only on capturing pictures of monuments and adding them to the Items, we also try to create articles. And this has helped improve knowledge within our community.»

There are, anyway, still some challenges that Sadik and his community face: «Wikidata, for me, is the future of Wikimedia. But for us to be able to achieve this, there should be a lot more support for Wikidata contributors. I still find it difficult to convince people to contribute more on Wikidata, instead of just contributing to Wikipedia, also because many of our tools still do not support some of the smaller languages.» And maybe some more efforts on the outreach side of things might be of help: «I loved the WikidataCon; it opened my mind. We should have more events like that. Maybe even an African version of the WikidataCon, that would be wonderful,» he concludes.

Evelin Heidel, also known as Scann, is a Wikimedian from Uruguay. She currently serves as Project Coordinator for the Wikimedistas of Uruguay User Group.

«The first thing we noticed – she begins – was that most of the Uruguayan editors edit on Wikipedia, but not on Wikimedia Commons or Wikidata. We found that very interesting, especially if we think that Uruguay has actually a very strong open data community: we have government agencies that are dedicated to provide open datasets, Uruguay was the place where Abre Latam, a big open data conference in Latin America, happened… so I asked myself “Why do we have so few people doing Wikidata stuff?” And that’s why we decided to focus on that.»

Scann enthusiastically talks to us about her user group’s planned activities for the near future, which will involve of course also Wikidata: «we are planning a three-pronged approach, so to speak. First of all, we want to make sure that we work more with Wikidata and GLAM institutions, particularly with libraries.» As a matter of fact, libraries are the favorite object of interest for Evelin: «I would love to have the Latin American librarian community to be more involved in Wikidata conversations. We have seen this transformation happening in Europe and in North America: when the librarian community gets involved, they change the whole conversation. It’s so powerful!»

But it’s not just about the GLAMs: «since we have this vast open data community, we want to establish a paid position for an “open data fellowship.” We want this Fellow to be a liaison capable of helping with some of the more technical aspects of Wikidata, but also with keeping contacts with other organizations and conferences. And then, lastly, we want to foster advocacy about Wikidata in the open data community. Wikidata can be a very technical project, so we want to hold workshops about how Wikidata works, and make the wider community aware of the possibilities of Wikidata.»

The ultimate goal is to achieve a better distribution of knowledge and capabilities: «interestingly enough, Uruguay is a very small country, but has one of the highest proportions of Wikipedians per population, and so I think we can make use of that. Ideally, we would also like to improve the representation of Uruguay and Latin America on the Internet, especially regarding the communities of African descent. They are mostly reactive to the topic, and most of them are in a position where they can help in turning the conversation around, like university professors or librarians. And we also collaborate with the Ministry of Social Development, which has also a heavy involvement in this issue, and has much data about these communities.»

The gaps in data available and in how communities are represented on the Internet are, in the end, the main focus of this conversation: «I think we can be part of this redistribution of power, we can establish this kind of broader social conversation. I’m very white, I went to university, so it’s not about me, it’s about the biases and the representation challenges we have in our society. My wish is that people understand Wikidata more, and more specifically how to contribute to it. Because there are gaps in how things are represented, and that’s a task for you to do. I think that gaining more understanding about Wikidata will help make it better. This is my wish – she concludes emphatically – and also my work agenda!»