Grants:Programs/Wikimedia Community Fund/Rapid Fund/Wikidata Ontology Course, third offering (ID: 23939162)
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Applicant Details
[edit]- Main Wikimedia username. (required)
Peter F. Patel-Schneider (talk • accounts • contributions • edit count)
- Organization
N/A
- If you are a group or organization leader, board member, president, executive director, or staff member at any Wikimedia group, affiliate, or Wikimedia Foundation, you are required to self-identify and present all roles. (required)
N/A
- Describe all relevant roles with the name of the group or organization and description of the role. (required)
Main Proposal
[edit]- 1. Please state the title of your proposal. This will also be the Meta-Wiki page title.
Wikidata Ontology Course, third offering
- 2. and 3. Proposed start and end dates for the proposal.
2026-09-01 - 2026-11-30
- 4. Where will this proposal be implemented? (required)
International (more than one country across continents or regions) Peter, Ege, and Margaret will be in Germany, Canada, and the United States of America when preparing and giving the course. Guest lecturers and participants will be chosen without regard to geography. The course itself will be online, with no geographic requirements on participants.
- 5. Are your activities part of a Wikimedia movement campaign, project, or event? If so, please select the relevant project or campaign. (required)
Not applicable
- 6. What is the change you are trying to bring? What are the main challenges or problems you are trying to solve? Describe this change or challenges, as well as main approaches to achieve it. (required)
Wikidata is an extremely large knowledge base, and contains many inconsistencies and errors. While some of these are impractical to track, there are a lot of issues that are formulaic and possible to tackle. Efforts to track these issues are very limited, and the efforts to fix them are even more limited. The wiki way to approach these problems requires the solution process to be collective, interesting, and fun. The Ontology Wikiproject has long been doing work to progress this, in order to make Wikidata a more robust database. However, the visibility of ontology-related work on Wikidata is very low as is the understanding of Wikidata ontology. We aim to increase the visibility and reach of Project Ontology by educating Wikidatans about the Wikidata ontology and encouraging them to be active members of the project and help in improving the Wikidata ontology.
The main technical problems on Wikidata that we are tackling are:
- Lack of easy-to-understand guidelines for building and modifying the Wikidata ontology. For example, the two main properties of the Wikidata ontology are P31 (instance of) and P279 (subclass of). These two properties are often misused, to the point that useful extracts of Wikidata often just treat them the same. - Lack of easy-to-understand methods for retrieving non-trivial information from the ontology. For example, it is difficult to retrieve class order information, which if available could help in reducing the many type-token mixups that are prevalent in Wikidata. - Lack of understanding of the constructs in the Wikidata ontology and how they interact to provide the basis for all information in Wikidata. For example, currently disjointness is an underused construct in the ontology, and where it is used it has lots of problems. More and better use of disjointness would help structure the ontology to provide a better basis for other information in Wikidata.
Our current effort to alleviate these problems is to design and present a course on the Wikidata ontology. The course will present information on the Wikidata ontology and techniques for extending and repairing the ontology in a way that is easy to understand. The course will produce Wikidatans who are knowledgeable about the Wikidata ontology and likely to join and be active in Wikiproject Ontology. Running a course also provides us with direct feedback on what methods are best for disseminating information related to the Wikidata ontology that can then be used to improve other methods for disseminating this information, including static wiki pages.
This will be the third offering of this course. The first two offerings have been successfully completed, with support for the first offering from a WIkimedia Foundation rapid grant and support for the second offering from Wikidata Switzerland. In this offering we want to scale the course up to between 40 and 60 participants. For more details about the first two offerings see the course page at https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:WikiProject_Ontology/Ontology_Course.
- 7. What are the planned activities? (required) Please provide a list of main activities. You can also add a link to the public page for your project where details about your project can be found. Alternatively, you can upload a timeline document. When the activities include partnerships, include details about your partners and planned partnerships.
We plan to have 8 weeks of two-hour online sessions, plus two weeks for project work, with 40-60 participants. Sessions will include presentations, discussions, tutorials, etc. We will have other contact hours every week. Participants are expected to spend about 2 hours of their own time every week for better understanding the topics being presented, to finish the exercises, and to develop an independent project. During the last half of the course there will be time devoted to projects, meeting with the groups according to their needs and at mutually available times. Projects may continue after the end of the course.
The course will generally follow the outline used for the first two offerings of the course. The slides for these offerings can be seen at the course's main page https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:WikiProject_Ontology/Ontology_Course. Before the course starts we will revise and reorder the course topics to take into account lessons learned in the first and second offerings of the course.
- 8. Describe your team. Please provide their roles, Wikimedia Usernames and other details. (required) Include more details of the team, including their roles, usernames, Wikimedia group, and whether they are salaried, volunteers, consultants/contractors, etc. Team members involved in the grant application need to be aware of their involvement in the project.
Peter F. Patel-Schneider is a long-time researcher in knowledge representation with special interests in knowledge graphs, ontologies, and Wikidata. Has been editing Wikidata for nearly 10 years. Earlier publications and presentations on Wikidata include https://arxiv.org/abs/2008.03900 and https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Barriers_to_Using_Wikidata_as_a_Knowledge_Base.pdf
Ege Dogan (egezort) is a Graduate in Computer Science and has been a Wikimedian for around 5 years. He was a cohort of the Organiser Labs course from 2023. He has conducted many Wikimedia workshops in university functions and elsewhere.
Margaret Warren (Zeroexp) has extensive experience in knowledge-based applications. She was the TA for the second offering of the course.
Peter and Ege will be the main presenters during the course and will be revising and updating course materials. Margaret will be the TA for the course and will be responsible for processing exercises and assisting on projects. Ege will also be assisting on projects.
Peter and Ege have co-authored two papers about problems in the Wikidata ontology: https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.15550 https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.13707
Peter and Ege started a group to address problems in the Wikidata ontology that meets regularly to discuss possible fixes to the Wikidata ontology
All three will be reimbursed for their time from the grant.
- 9. Who are the target participants and from which community? How will you engage participants before and during the activities? How will you follow up with participants after the activities? (required)
The target demographic is people who already understand how Wikidata works, as we will not be spending much time on introductory Wikidata subjects. (If an applicant doesn’t have Wikidata experience but has similar experience, that’s also okay.) We intend to link tohttps://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Training in our acceptance confirmation, for participants to check until the beginning of the course.
Some things that would increase participants’ likelihood of being appropriate for the course are:
Proficiency in SQL or SPARQL Proficiency in Python Theoretical knowledge in ontology, databases, representation theory, etc. Experience running projects Documentation skills
The sessions will be conducted in English.
We have publicized the course in various Wikidata-related venues. Initial registration for the second offering of the course was far more than we could handle so we instituted a waiting list which still has over 100 people on it. These people will be first in line for the third offering of the course. We may again publicize the course through channels that people already active in Wikidata use, such as the Wikidata Telegram group, the Project Chat pages of WikiProject Ontology, etc.
Our engagement with the participants during the activities is described in the timeline.
After the course ends, we hope that most participants will want to be a part of the WikiProject Ontology or some other Wikidata WikiProject and join our Wikiproject Ontology Telegram group. In our previous offerings, we managed to get significant retention, and we hope to continue that.
We are planning to create a Wikimedia User Group with a close connection to the Wikidata Ontology and will encourage participants to join this user group.
- 10. Does your project involve work with children or youth? (required)
No
- 10.1. Please provide a link to your Youth Safety Policy. (required) If the proposal indicates direct contact with children or youth, you are required to outline compliance with international and local laws for working with children and youth, and provide a youth safety policy aligned with these laws. Read more here.
N/A
- 11. How did you discuss the idea of your project with your community members and/or any relevant groups? Please describe steps taken and provide links to any on-wiki community discussion(s) about the proposal. (required) You need to inform the community and/or group, discuss the project with them, and involve them in planning this proposal. You also need to align the activities with other projects happening in the planned area of implementation to ensure collaboration within the community.
There has been extensive discussion of the first two offerings in various Wikidata venues, with significant response from the community. Wikimedia Deutschland publicized the second offering and we heard that the topic had a large amount of discussion. There is the Wikidata wiki page https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:WikiProject_Ontology/Ontology_Course that details our plans. This page has been shared via the Wikidata Telegram group, WikiProject Ontology Telegram group, and Wikidata Weekly News.
We have received support by community members in several places and an excellent response from the Wikidata team at Wikimedia Deutschland.
- 12. Does your proposal aim to work to bridge any of the content knowledge gaps (Knowledge Inequity)? Select one option that most apply to your work. (required)
Not applicable
- 13. Does your proposal include any of these areas or thematic focus? Select one option that most applies to your work. (required)
Education
- 14. Will your work focus on involving participants from any underrepresented communities? Select one option that most apply to your work. (required)
Not applicable
- 15. In what ways do you think your proposal most contributes to the Movement Strategy 2030 recommendations. Select one that most applies. (required)
Increase the Sustainability of Our Movement
Learning and metrics
[edit]- 17. What do you hope to learn from your work in this project or proposal? (required)
How best to present information about the Wikidata ontology. How complicated can ontology content become before we start confusing people too much. How easy it is to get people interested in ontology and Wikidata maintenance work. How motivating are incentives in developing activities for User Groups. Are people that are our target demographic only interested in technical work, or are they interested in community building as well. What’s the ratio of people who would continue doing this community building work.
The participant projects will explore areas of the Wikidata ontology and we expect to learn both by facilitating the projects and seeing the final results.
- 18. What are your Wikimedia project targets in numbers (metrics)? (required)
| Other Metrics | Target | Optional description |
|---|---|---|
| Number of participants | 40 | We are scaling up the course and want to have 40 to 60 participants, with 20-30 projects. |
| Number of editors | 40 | All participants are expected to edit Wikidata. |
| Number of organizers | 3 | See above for organizers' roles. |
| Wikimedia project | Number of content created or improved |
|---|---|
| Wikipedia | |
| Wikimedia Commons | 8 |
| Wikidata | 100 |
| Wiktionary | |
| Wikisource | |
| Wikimedia Incubator | |
| Translatewiki | |
| MediaWiki | |
| Wikiquote | |
| Wikivoyage | |
| Wikibooks | |
| Wikiversity | |
| Wikinews | |
| Wikispecies | |
| Wikifunctions or Abstract Wikipedia |
- Optional description for content contributions.
The Wikimedia Commons files will be updated session slides. The Wikidata edits are results of project activities.
- 19. Do you have any other project targets in numbers (metrics)? (optional)
Yes
| Main Open Metrics | Description | Target |
|---|---|---|
| Course projects | A requirement for the course is to do a small project related to the Wikidata ontology. We expect between 20 and 30 projects, but want at least 15. | 15 |
| Continuing projects | We want course projects to continue after the end of the course. We expect that between 1/3 and 1/2 of the projects do continue. | 5 |
| N/A | N/A | N/A |
| N/A | N/A | N/A |
| N/A | N/A | N/A |
- 20. What tools would you use to measure each metrics? Please refer to the guide for a list of tools. You can also write that you are not sure and need support. (required)
These metrics can all be easily determined during the course, except for continuing projects, which can only be determined well after the course finishes, and Wikidata edits, which we will estimate based on project reports. We expect many more Wikidata edits than the minimum, but some projects may only edit a few Wikidata items because all that they will be doing is adding a few classes to Wikidata so we need to keep this number low just in case all the projects are of this kind.
Financial proposal
[edit]- 21. Please upload your budget for this proposal or indicate the link to it. (required)
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ZxSTcF8r6lmiSoQrVy4B5PMqOqUTbe-dwFDGR9uGfm4/edit?usp=sharing
- 22. and 22.1. What is the amount you are requesting for this proposal? Please provide the amount in your local currency. (required)
4825 USD
- 22.2. Convert the amount requested into USD using the Oanda converter. This is done only to help you assess the USD equivalent of the requested amount. Your request should be between 500 - 5,000 USD.
4825 USD
- By submitting your proposal/funding request you confirm that you have read and agree to the Application Privacy Statement, WMF Friendly Space Policy, and the Universal Code of Conduct.
Yes
Endorsements and Feedback
[edit]Please add endorsements and feedback to the grant discussion page only. Endorsements added here will be removed automatically.
Community members are invited to share meaningful feedback on the proposal and include reasons why they endorse the proposal. Consider the following:
- Stating why the proposal is important for the communities involved and why they think the strategies chosen will achieve the results that are expected.
- Highlighting any aspects they think are particularly well developed: for instance, the strategies and activities proposed, the levels of community engagement, outreach to underrepresented groups, addressing knowledge gaps, partnerships, the overall budget and learning and evaluation section of the proposal, etc.
- Highlighting if the proposal focuses on any interesting research, learning or innovation, etc. Also if it builds on learning from past proposals developed by the individual or organization, or other Wikimedia communities.
- Analyzing if the proposal is going to contribute in any way to important developments around specific Wikimedia projects or Movement Strategy.
- Analysing if the proposal is coherent in terms of the objectives, strategies, budget, and expected results (metrics).