Wikimania 2024

Wikidata and authority control for researchers: the cases of Switzerland and Italy
08-10, 16:00–16:25 (Poland), Dilijan (3) (interpretation)
Language: English

This session explores the transformative potential of Wikidata in scholarly data curation, focusing on Swiss and Italian initiatives under the WikiCite umbrella. Emphasizing manual refinement and outreach, these projects aim to enrich academic author items and provide support to fragmented institutional repositories. Challenges include reconciling disparate data sources and addressing homonyms. Strategies for stakeholder engagement and social media utilization are discussed, with a goal of establishing national-level Wikidata communities. The feasibility of this framework and potential progress metrics are explored, highlighting the importance of comprehensive collaboration for maximizing Wikidata's impact on research visibility and collaboration.


In the realm of scholarly data curation, Wikidata stands out as a potent platform for fostering research visibility and collaboration. This session offers a preliminary comparative analysis of two significant ongoing initiatives in Switzerland and Italy, focusing on indexing academic authors within the Wikidata framework.

The two projects have been incorporated into the WikiCite initiative umbrella. However, they adopt an approach centered around manual refinement, outreach, and long-term comprehensiveness. The initial phase is primarily geared towards enhancing researcher profiles, aiming to facilitate the enhancement of numerous currently string-based institutional repositories.

We will explore various approaches and address challenges involved in integrating academic information within different national contexts. Specifically, we'll discuss strategies on Wikidata for handling fragmented or uniform institutional repositories, reconciling to them relevant authority files and citation databases and proposing relevant ID properties.

We also illustrate our approach for the case of homonyms and the need of a more integrated effort on this aspect to reach full potential, especially on data-round tripping.

We will also discuss how to reach out to institutional stakeholders, and employ appropriate social media strategies.

Our objective is in the end to demonstrate the feasibility of establishing a national-level framework for engaged Wikidata communities with a focused strategy. Additionally, we will briefly examine potential metrics and evaluation methods for reporting progress.

Session recording: https://youtu.be/iZJ9OtiQxH8?list=PLhV3K_DS5YfJdC5P86rsDsUtxEow0gDnR&t=23930


How does your session relate to the event themes: Collaboration of the Open?*

The proposed session on scholarly data curation and Wikidata clearly aligns with the event theme of "Collaboration of the Open" in several ways:

  • Open Collaboration: The session revolves around leveraging Wikidata. By discussing initiatives in Switzerland and Italy, the session showcases how open collaboration is essential in building and maintaining comprehensive databases of scholarly information.

  • Wikimedia Collaboration: The session is directly related to the Wikimedia movement through its focus on WikiCite initiatives. By incorporating academic authors into Wikidata, the session highlights how collaborations within Wikimedia groups can lead to the creation of valuable resources for researchers and the wider community.

  • Cross-Border Collaboration: By comparing initiatives in different national contexts (Switzerland and Italy), the session emphasizes the importance of collaboration transcending borders. It encourages participants to learn from diverse experiences and adopt strategies that can be applied globally.

  • Engagement with Stakeholders: The session addresses the importance of reaching out to institutional stakeholders and employing social media strategies, emphasizing the collaborative efforts needed to engage various actors in the scholarly community.

  • Community Building: The session aims to demonstrate the feasibility of establishing national-level frameworks for engaged Wikidata communities, highlighting the collaborative nature of building and sustaining such communities.

Overall, the session fits well within the "Open Data" track and can potentially appeal to a wide audience interested in open research, data reuse, and exporting collaborative initiatives.

What is the experience level needed for the audience for your session?*

Some experience will be needed

How do you plan to deliver this session?*

Onsite in Katowice

What other themes or topics does your session fit into? Please choose from the list of tags below.
See also: Presentation in pdf format

member of WikiClassics User Group, Wikimedia Italia, Wikimedia Switzerland, also active in the past in WikiDonne user group, Wikimedia Sweden and Wikimedia Portugal; coordinator for Wiki Loves Monuments in Tuscany, coordinator for Wiki Science Competition.

He is currently primarily active with Wikimedia Switzerland.