Education/News/October 2023/Celebrating Wikidata’s Birthday in Elbasan

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Celebrating Wikidata’s Birthday in Elbasan, Albania.

Author: Vyolltsa
Summary: Wikimedians of Albanian Language User Group organized a 2-day workshop about Wikidata project in Elbasan, Albania. With the collaboration of the Linguistic Department at the Aleksandër Xhuvani University and the support of the Switch Technologies Start-up, 24 participants gathered to explore and celebrate Wikidata’s 11th birthday.
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Wikimedians of Albanian Language User Group organized a 2-day workshop about Wikidata project in Elbasan, Albania.

The Linguistic Department provided expertise in language, lexemes, and authors aligning with Wikidata’s goal of creating a multilingual knowledge database. At the workshop, we intended to empower people with the knowledge and skills to contribute to Wikidata’s repository of structured data.

Over the course of these days, we tried to highlight some points:

Wikidata fundamentals

We went over the overview of Wikidata’s principles, ensuring that all the participants had a general glimpse to build upon. Training on queries and lexeme: Participants were guided through practical exercises, creating and editing Wikidata items, and ran queries. They learned how to add references, labels, descriptions, add lexemes and more.

Collaborative editing

Everyone in the workshop engaged in the editing sessions, working together to improve the existing items and lexeme, create new ones. Participants worked on different topics. For example, students from the department of Linguistics, worked on linguists, academics on Wikidata.

Networking and knowledge exchange

This workshop was a fantastic opportunity for people to connect with other Wikidata enthusiasts, share their experience and networks.

Statistics from this successful workshop are as below:

  • 24 participants
  • 771 contributions
  • 21 items were created
  • 214 items were edited
  • 11 lexemes were created
  • 39 uploads on Commons

Here are some pictures from the event: