WikiData Days 2020

COVID-19 UPDATE: WIKIDATA DAYS POSTPONED

COVID-19 (SARS-CoV2) has unleashed a potentially severe health challenge globally.

Portugal recently recorded the first cases and the number of infected people is rising. The event venue is taking this issue very seriously and following the recommendations of the World Health Organization and the National Health Authority. Nova University has enforced a contingency plan for this outbreak, in which all events with more than 50 participants need to be cancelled until further notice.

We are very disappointed that we cannot deliver this conference this summer, and we hope that we can give you good news soon. We will continue to monitor the COVID-19 outbreak and as soon we can set up a new date, we will inform you. We are looking into rescheduling to a later date when conditions improve.

Nova School of Business and Economics Library and Wikimedia Portugal would like to thank everyone involved in the organization and the hard work and input of all volunteers. We appreciate the effort of scholarships proponents and people who already submitted their calls for this event.

Be safe and see you soon. The organizing committee

INTRODUCTION

Wikidata Days will be the first regional Wikidata conference to take place in Portugal. We are focused on making connections between Wikimedians and Librarians, Archivists, Curators and Data enthusiasts. In this event, we hope that everyone can in its own scale leave with a sense they can all contribute to open knowledge. We want to showcase how Wikidata can be used, either by large institutions with a lot of resources, or small low budget institutions. There will be a strong emphasis on capacity building with Workshops taking place in all days of the event, from beginner to more experienced users. For those already working with Wikidata this will be an opportunity to contact Wikimedia experts. This is also a great opportunity to strengthen collaboration on a regional level.

PURPOSE AND VISION

This event has roots in the GLAM Days at the National Library of Portugal in 2017, followed by the first edition of Wikidata Days in 2019 at Nova School of Business and Economics, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, organized by Teresa e Alexandre Soares dos Santos Library in collaboration with Wikimedia Portugal.

The vision of this event is: share, collaborate, transform: shaping data in a changing world. The GLAMs (Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums) and the Research sector are valuable partners that help realize Wikimedia’s mission to “empower and engage people around the world to collect and develop educational content under a free license or in the public domain, and to disseminate it effectively and globally.”

Wikidata is a free open multilingual and collaboratively edited knowledge base that works as a repository of structured and linked data. Since its inception in 2012, it has become increasingly more relevant in the fields of GLAM and Research. Many institutions and individuals are already using Wikidata as an open data infrastructure for their projects, for example, to increase the visibility of their collections or to disseminate scholarly information. We want to create an opportunity for people to share their experiences, expertise, best-practices and stimulate collaboration and partnerships between the Wikimedia Movement and other actors, in particular with the Academia, GLAMs and other communities.

THEME

To further explore Wikidata Days 2020 theme, the conference program will be organized around 3 areas: Science/Research, GLAMs, and Communities.

Science & Research

Open Science is the movement to make scientific research and dissemination accessible to all levels of an inquiring society, amateur or professional. In this conference, you will discover how Wikimedia Projects can contribute to this goal. You will get to know more about Wikicite, an initiative to develop open citations and linked bibliographic data, and also Scholia, a service that shows us the potential of Wikidata as a source of bibliographic information that can be queried to produce bibliometric visualizations.

Open data initiatives are multiplying, increasing transparency and providing opportunities for data reuse, which can have a positive social impact. Furthermore, Citizen Science projects (scientific research conducted by nonprofessional scientists) increases participation and also the public’s awareness and understanding of science.

Both individuals and research institutions have a role to play in these movements. In Wikidata Days you will have the opportunity to know more about these projects and get involved, meet people already working on these topics and participate in workshops that will give you the skills necessary to start a new project that can have a big impact in your community.

GLAMs

This event is a unique opportunity for you to learn more about the open knowledge movement, how museums, galleries and archives around the world have started partnering with Wikidata to enrich their collections and widen their audiences, and how you and your institutions can join a growing global network of cultural heritage leaders.

Open knowledge is about making knowledge more widely accessible to the world. With Wikidata, cultural institutions have been able to open up their collections, working with volunteers around the world to add them into the world’s largest digital database and embedding critical contextual information. Information on Wikidata is available across languages, easily indexed and searched, and part of a global network that connects multiple digital collections.

This will be the first regional Wikidata conference to take place in Portugal. During this event, you will join colleagues from local museums, archives and galleries to learn more about how this initiative can help our cultural heritage collections become more useful and more impactful for the public that we serve. The program will include Wikidata leaders as well as firsthand training from archive and museum experts, based in Portugal and around the world, on ways to contribute to open knowledge.

There will be something for everyone – we will host workshops for beginners as well as those with more of an intermediate understanding about open structured data. We will also share examples of how other museums and archives around the world have started working with Wikidata to enrich their collections. You will come away with a deep understanding of the benefits of Wikidata for your organization, as well as specific actions you and your institutions will be able to take in the coming months.

Communities

How can we achieve knowledge equity? In this event, you will get to learn about the impact of Wikidata and Wikimedia projects in increasing the visibility of knowledge and communities that traditionally have been underrepresented. Underrepresented knowledge and communities can work together with open movements to build a stronger and fairer society.

Being a regional conference, we want to foster relationships between the Portuguese community and other Wikimedia communities, exploring geographic (Spain and Africa) and language proximity (Brazil). Capacity building is one of the keys to a stronger movement and involvement of volunteers. There will be plenty of workshops dedicated to Wikidata and related tools that will allow you to develop your skills and meet experts in the field. You will have the possibility to interact with different communities, from open licensing and open data to open-source software and open access. There will be space to reflect and discuss the Wikimedia strategy.

We want new projects and partnerships to emerge. Take this opportunity to meet some of the key players in the movement and get involved in Wikimedia projects.

CONFERENCE GOALS

Inspire the existing community and increase the number of new editors, mainly from the GLAM and Academic & Education sectors;
Create a network of institutions willing to work on Wikidata/Wikibase shared projects.
Increase cooperative work with Spain and Africa (neighbor affiliates) and Brazil (language proximity).

TARGET AUDIENCE

Educators and Researchers
Librarians, Archivists and Museums information professionals
Wikimedians
Open Data-driven people
Digital Humanists