User:Wittylama/Schedule draft/Wikicite: Lifting a veil on the sources of free knowledge
- Format
Workshop
- Keywords
sources; citations; references; notability; structured data
- When and where
- Saturday 21 July, 11:30 - 13:00
- Montreal room
- Duration: 85 minutes
- Presenter(s)
User:Dario (WMF), User:Daniel Mietchen, User:Pigsonthewing
- Topic area
- Relationship to theme
Content Quality, 
Knowledge forms
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
- <add your username here if you are interested in attending>