User:Daniel Mietchen/Submissions/Zooming in on Africa-related research: Wikidata-based scholarly profiles of people, papers, places, topics and more

From Wikimania
Scholia profile for the topic of Zika virus

About

This page hosts materials related to the session "Zooming in on Africa-related research: Wikidata-based scholarly profiles of people, papers, places, topics and more" at Wikimania 2018. The page will be regularly updated until the event, and possibly thereafter.

Abstract

African research is underrepresented in many disciplinary and international contexts, and even research about Africa-related topics is often given more prominence when performed or reported from outside of Africa. These imbalances have a range of causes, and the scope of this submission is to highlight how WikiCite-driven efforts to catalog references in Wikidata can help in identifying and visualizing such gaps, communicating about them and supporting efforts to eventually address them.

Scholia is a Wikidata-based website hosted on Wikimedia Labs that displays information about scholarly publications: https://tools.wmflabs.org/scholia/ . It can zoom in on the associated authors, journals, topics, organizations, events, locations and other related information and present it in a way that facilitates the appreciation and quality control of what is in Wikidata as well as an exploration of what is missing or only covered with large gaps.

Many of the gaps that can be highlighted this way have a strong link to Africa. This session will be consciously biased towards people, papers, places, topics and more in African contexts, with an eye on applicability in other underrepresented regions. After an introductory overview of Africa-related research indexed in Wikidata with an emphasis on medicine and biodiversity, session participants will be invited to use Scholia to assess the quality, topicality and comprehensiveness of Africa-related research topics in their areas of expertise, to document gaps and to develop ideas for systemic improvements based on public domain data sources.

The session will be given on the basis of https://wikimania2018.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Daniel_Mietchen/Submissions/Zooming_in_on_Africa-related_research:_Wikidata-based_scholarly_profiles_of_people,_papers,_places,_topics_and_more , which hosts a public and editable copy of the submission.

Presentation

Introduction

Africa-related research

Places

People

Papers

Topics

Organizations

Journals

Species

Awards

See also