Hey all,
I'd like to hear from you on a proposal to add some order and structure to
the various bibliographic corpora we currently have in Wikidata.
As you may know, coverage of creative works in Wikidata has seen
significant growth over the last year. [1][2] Different groups and projects
have started importing source metadata for various reasons:
- to provide sources machine-extracted statements (WikiFactMine [3],
StrepHit [4])
- to represent sources cited in Wikipedia (e.g. DOIs and PMIDs imported
via the mwcite identifier dumps) or other Wikimedia projects (Wikisource,
Wikispecies, Wikinews)
- to create collections of the open access literature citable and
reusable in Wikimedia projects (e.g. open access PMC review articles)
- to maintain small, curated corpora about specific topics (e.g. the
Zika corpus [5])
While all these efforts have grown organically and with little
coordination, it's hard to keep track of who initiated the, to clearly
communicate their purpose, to understand their completion criteria and
their data quality needs, and last but not least to offer any contribution
opportunities (in terms of code, or manual labor) to other community
members. It's unclear if the future of these efforts should continue to be
within Wikidata, or leverage the power of federated Wikibase-powered wikis
(see our discussion at the end of the WikiCite session at WikidataCon [6]).
Irrespective of the best long term solution, we need to provide some better
structure to these efforts today if we want to address the above problems.
I'd like to propose a fairly simple solution and hear your feedback on
whether it makes sense to implement it as is or with some modifications.
1. create a Wikidata class called "Wikidata item collection" [Q-X]
2. create and document individual collections (e.g. the Wikidata Zika
corpus [Q-Y]) as instances of this class: [Q-Y] --P31--> [Q-X]
3. add appropriate metadata to describe such collections (its main
topic(s), creators, any external identifiers, if applicable)
4. mark individual bibliographic items as part of [P361] the
corresponding collections
Note that this approach can apply to bibliographic item collections but
also to any other set of items not directly identifiable via Wikidata
properties. Of course, the same items could obviously be part of multiple
collections. Some criteria would be needed to determine an appropriate
threshold for legitimate collections (we wouldn't want arbitrary
collections to be created for sets of items generated as part of a test
import).
Beyond solving the issues listed above, this approach would also allow us
to generate dedicated statistics on the growth or data quality of each
collection via the SPARQL endpoint. It would also allow us to design
constraints for arbitrary item collections, something that right now is
not possible (unless these sets can already be identified via a query).
If something similar already exists in the context of structured data
donations/imports for GLAM, I'd be most grateful for any pointers.
Dario
[1]
http://wikicite.org/statistics.html
[2]
https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.5548591.v1
[3]
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Project/ContentMine/WikiFactMine
[4]
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IEG/StrepHit:_Wikidata_Statements_Va…
[5]
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:WikiProject_Zika_Corpus
[6]
https://mirror.netcologne.de/CCC/events/wikidatacon/2017/h264-hd/wikidataco…