Wikidata

explain what Wikidata is here

Linking data on Wikidata

In 2018, I went through the proposal process of asking for a new Wikidata property for the Mormon Literature and Creative Arts Database (MLCAD). Afterwards, I used the mix-n-match tool to match some 700 entries to their corresponding entry in Wikidata (many entries have no match would require creating a new Wikidata page, which I didn't do as part of this project). This tool made it easier to match a person in MLCAD to their wikidata page, and then when they matched, to create a property on the Wikidata page that linked to their page on MLCAD.

Uploading MORE data?

LIT gave me a file of all the data on MLCAD, and I cleaned it up using OpenRefine, an open-access tool with some similarities to Excel, but more tools for cleaning and organizing large sets of data. OpenRefine has a separate matching tool that uses other properties like birth date and death date to make an accurate match of the entries to existing Wikidata pages. I made a lot of matches using this tool. It allowed me not just to link the MLCAD, but to mass-edit the Wikidata entries to include additional data from MLCAD. Unfortunately, due to my inexperience, I ended up spending a lot of time cleaning my mass-edits, because OpenRefine made a lot of incorrect matches. Part of the reason it made so many incorrect matches is because the MLCAD dataset had a lot of incomplete data (so if an entry didn't have a birthdate/deathdate, it just tried to match based on first and last name).

Ideas for future development

The holy grail of Wikidata work for libraries is (supposedly) data round-tripping. That would mean 1) we share our data with Wikidata and 2) we would update our data with user-submitted corrections and 3) we would update our Wikidata data with our professionally-updated data. One great resource of data the library has is bibliographic data. Uploading bibliographic data to Wikidata would make it easier to cite books using the CiteQ template on enwiki. Another institution has done something like this and you can read about it in Chapter 17 of Wikipedia and Academic Libraries: A Global Project. You might also be interested in my summary of GLAM projects and research using Wikidata from 2022.