Program/WikiCite: Lifting a veil on the sources of free knowledge

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WikiCite: Lifting a veil on the sources of free knowledge

WikiCite: Lifting a veil on the sources of free knowledge
Slides from the session
Notes
Format

Workshop

Keywords
  • Wikipedia
  • Wikidata
  • sources
  • citations
  • references
  • notability
  • structured data
When and where
  • Saturday 21 July, 11:30
  • Duration: 85 minutes
  • Mexico City

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Presenter(s)
Topic area
Relationship to theme

Content Quality
Knowledge forms

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Abstract

Wikimedia projects are a gateway to knowledge represented in a vast range of external sources. Every day, thousands of volunteer editors find, discuss, and vet sources to establish their reliability and decide what information should go in the free encyclopedia or one of its sister projects. While sourcing information is one of the key processes by which free knowledge is produced, to date little dedicated infrastructure exists to support Wikimedians' fact-checking work. Over the past 3 years, the WikiCite initiative has brought together community members, librarians, researchers and developers to build a structured knowledge base of sources, leveraging Wikidata as its infrastructure. WikiCite aims to create a rich corpus of structured data about sources, allowing contributors to annotate and reuse information about publications, enrich their metadata, and link them up to structured knowledge hosted in Wikidata.

With this workshop, our primary goal is to promote participation in this initiative, give an introduction to how sources are stored in Wikidata and an overview of existing tools and workflows that contributors can use, and discuss strategies to identify gaps and biases in sources. One of the key goals of building such a repository of sources is to be able to lift a veil on the provenance of facts, shine a light on underrepresented areas of knowledge and understand how sources that are marginal in the Wikimedia ecosystem can be represented and captured. Wikipedia notability policies depend on sources that are heavily skewed towards mainstream media and academic publication outlets, which makes the inclusion of knowledge and topics underrepresented in these sources a challenge. We will allocate half of this workshop to group discussions to identify use cases and opportunities to research gaps in sources and the possibility of importing and curating bibliographic corpora or library collections to address these gaps.

Outcomes

  • awareness of the initiative is raised and participation from other regions and languages is promoted
  • attendees understand how sources are stored in Wikidata and what tools and workflows they can use
  • new strategies are discussed to identify gaps and biases in sources Wikipedia gets its facts from
  • possible bibliographic corpora or library collections are identified through group discussion to address these gaps


Signup

  1. ViswaPrabhaവിശ്വപ്രഭtalk 00:04, 24 March 2018 (UTC) (Wikimedia India)[reply]
  2. Andrawaag (talk) 13:20, 27 May 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  3. Charles Matthews (talk) 15:35, 15 July 2018 (UTC) Interested in all ideas for populating the list set up at WD:SSFL, announced on wikicite-discuss here. See also Phabricator thread about a hackathon session, for the tech side.[reply]
  4. Masssly (talk) 14:06, 18 June 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  5. Rehman 09:59, 24 June 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  6. Aliwal2012 (talk) 11:04, 1 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  7. A ka es (talk) 06:29, 17 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  8. Bilqischondol (talk) 21:41, 17 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  9. Lentokonefani (talk) 06:37, 18 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  10. LiseHatt
  11. Heather Hodgson
  12. <add your username here if you are interested in attending>
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