Hey all,

Wikimedia Deutschland and the Wikimedia Foundation hosted the WikiCite event in Berlin last week, bringing together a large group of Wikidatans, Wikipedians, librarians, developers and researchers from all over the world.

The event built a lot of momentum around the definition of data models, workflows and technology needed to better represent source and citation data from Wikimedia projects, Wikidata in particular.

While we're still drafting a human-readable report, I thought I'd share a preview of the notes from the various workgroups, to give you a sense of what we worked on and to let everyone join the discussion:

Main workgroups

Modeling bibliographic source metadata

Discuss and draft data models to represent different types of sources as Wikidata items

Reference extraction and metadata lookup tools

Design or improve tools to extract identifiers and bibliographic data from Wikipedia citation templates, look up and retrieve metadata

Representing citations and citation events

Discuss how to express the citation of a source in a Wikimedia artifact (such as a Wikipedia article, a Wikidata statements etc.) and review alternative ways to represent them

(Semi-)automated ways to add references to Wikidata statements

Improve tools for semi-automated statement and reference creation (StrepHit, ContentMine)

Use cases for source-related queries

Identify use cases for SPARQL queries involving source metadata. Obtain a small open licensed bibliographic and citation graph dataset to build a proof-of-concept of the querying and visualization potential of source metadata in Wikidata.

Additional workgroups

Wikidata as the central hub on license information on databases

Add license information to Wikidata to make Wikidata the central hub on license information on databases

Using citations and bibliographic source metadata

Merge groups working on citation structure and source metadata models and integrate their recommendations

Citoid-Wikidata integration

Extend Citoid to write source metadata into Wikidata


We're opening up the wikicite-discuss@wikimedia.org mailing list to anyone interested in interacting with the participants in the event (we encouraged them to use the official wikidata list for anything of interest to the broader community). Phabricator also has a dedicated tag for related initiatives.

The event was generously funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, and Crossref. We'll be exploring the feasibility of a follow-up event in the next 6-12 months to continue the work we started in Berlin and bring in more people than we could host due to funding/capacity.

Best,

Dario
on behalf of the organizers