Any Wikidata Fanatics Here?

OEGlobal Plaza
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As powerful a thing Wikipedia is, I feel sometimes the 'Pedia overshadows all the other parts of the ecosystem as entry points of contribution. I’ve always thought that before we launch people into writing / editing articles, a more gentle entry point is contributing media to Wikimedia Commons

I’ve also long been curious about, and just experienced a few forays into Wikidata, with a favorite being WikiShootMe as a way to discover and fill in gaps in imagery.

But this tweet from 2018 has lingered n my mind as something compelling one can do with queries of Wikidata. The link is a dynamic query and still works (and is still very red)

Is this of interest to anyone else out there? Or better yet, do we have any Wikidata expertise in the house? I wrote some more on my interest

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I consider myself a fairly novice Wikipedia and Wikidata editor, mostly because editing live documents is slightly scary for me, but I’m way more comfortable editing Wikidata and think linked data is super fun! I agree that Wikidata is a much easier entry point for most people. I’d be interested in doing more Wikidata stuff!

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It’s always good to have a librarian in “the house”! What sorts of Wikidata editing have you done, why? Where do you jump in?

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I got started after doing a formal course through Wiki Education (highly recommended). I like to edit people I’m reading mostly. If I’m reading a book, I’ll see if that author has a Wikidata item and make sure all the appropriate identifiers I’m familiar with are there. I haven’t really gotten past that.

I also really like that if I don’t want to start a whole article on something, starting a Wikidata item is way more low stakes. I also just completed the OER Wiki Scholars course last month and wrote the CCCOER Wikipedia page (please feel free to edit and add to this, it’s very basic right now!) and was delighted to see somebody had already created the Wikidata item that I was able to simply link the new Wikipedia page to. So neat!

Through that course, I realized how many open education groups and people aren’t included in Wikipedia, which is funny considering…you know, the open thing. I also redlinked Open Education Global on the CCCOER page to flag it as something that ought to have its own Wikipedia page. In the meantime, I quickly put together an Open Education Global Wikidata item.

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Thanks, that’s great to know. I’ve been hearing such positive remarks in the experiences of other colleagues who have done the WikiScholars program.

It’s interesting as it takes time to even see the impact. I used Wikishootme to identify a radio station that was near me that lacked a photo, added it to Wikidata, also Wikimedia Commons. I just peeked at the history and I was the first non-bot to update the Wikidata entry, but there’s been quite a lot added since.

And thanks for starting the CCCOER page and connecting OEGlobal in (we of course cannot edit but we’d love to have a public call for contributions).

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