Wikidata for Research
Event details
Date:Wednesday 24 April 2024
Time11:00am EST
Where:online
SlidesWikidata for Research
.
SEEKCommons encourages open research practices!

Wikidata for Research is a private online workshop for participants in the SEEKCommons socio-environmental knowledge commons project. The event includes an introduction to Wikidata, an explanation of Wikidata features which can improve research practices, and an invitation for each participant to edit Wikidata to develop metadata for research resources.

Socio-Environmental Knowledge Commons (SEEKCommons) project is dedicated to the investigation and promotion of open technologies in socio-environmental research. The project was made possible by a National Science Foundation FAIR-OS RCN grant (award #2226425).

Preparation

edit
  1. Before the workshop, please create a Wikimedia account. You quit reading and skip all the next steps if you at least just do that! Wikipedia, Wikidata, and other related wiki platforms all use the same login credentials.
  2. Identify any open "research resource" that you like and wish to share in Wikidata. The best resource to share is one that you can imagine other people reusing. It does not have to be your own resource. Examples of open resources include the following:
    1. a dataset
    2. software
    3. a conference, in the context of it as a knowledge source
    4. a device
    5. a reusable research method
    6. a paper, report, or book
  3. At the time of the workshop, login to your wiki account.
  4. Please sign in to the program dashboard while logged in. Anticipate that by logging in, you share your username and identify the Wikidata item that you edit in this program.
  5. At the workshop be ready to edit Wikidata

Instructions

edit

This is complete documentation for the workshop exercise.

While the workshop includes live instructions, feel free to follow these instructions during the workshop as a complement or alternative.

Goal: create a Wikidata item for a "research resource". The Wikidata item will contain metadata which describes that resource.

Why this matters: When documenting research it is useful to list what resources one used to accomplish it. For many reasons, registering the resource in a database, then citing the entry of that resource in the database, is the easiest way to concisely identify a resource in documentation.

  1. Identify a resource which you want to register in Wikidata
  2. Navigate to https://www.wikidata.org
  3. Log in
  4. Confirm that you are logged in by seeing your username displayed, usually in the top right of the screen
  5. Click "Create a new Item" or otherwise navigate to new item creation
  6. For label, enter the name of the resource
  7. for description, try to explain the resource in 2-5 words
  8. Proceed, and the item is created. You can now populate it with metadata.
  9. click "add statement". Wikidata will suggest statements to add, but for most items, try these:
    1. "instance of" = (whatever you have, such as "dataset", "software", or any fundamental explanation
    2. "main subject" = datasets, methods, reports, and sometimes even software has a subject
    3. "author", "developer", "creator" = (whichever is appropriate)
    4. "has use" = a function, like "science and technology studies" or "water testing"
    5. official website = URL, if the resource has an official website
    6. "full work available at URL" = URL of the best place you know to get a copy of the resource
    7. "described at URL" = a URL, if you have a webpage which describes the resource
    8. choose from the prompts that Wikidata offers to you. Add as many as you want and try for at least 5.
  10. You could be done after this point. To get suggestions for other metadata to log, check these data models:
    1. software -
    2. hardware
    3. datasets
    4. events
    5. research projects
    6. scholarly articles

Support

edit

These are options for support.

Contact

edit