Citations and references are the building blocks of Wikimedia projects. However, as of today, they are still treated as second-class citizens. Structured data bases such as Wikidata offer a unique opportunity https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:WikiProject_Source_MetaData to turn into reality over a decade of endeavors to build the sum of all citations and bibliographic metadata into a centralized repository. To coordinate upcoming work in this space, we're organizing a technical event in late May and opening up applications for prospective participants.

*WikiCite 2016 https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WikiCite_2016* is a hands-on event focused on designing data models and technology to *improve the coverage, quality, standards-compliance and machine-readability of citations and source metadata in Wikipedia, Wikidata and other Wikimedia projects*. Our goal, in particular, is to define a technical roadmap for building a repository of all Wikimedia references in Wikidata.

We are bringing together Wikidatans, Wikipedians, software engineers, data modelers, and information and library science experts from organizations including *Crossref*, *Zotero*, *CSL*, *ContentMine*, *Google*, *Datacite*, *NISO*, *OCLC* and the *NIH*. We are also inviting academic researchers with experience working with Wikipedia's citations and bibliographic data.

WikiCite will be hosted in *Berlin* on *May 25-26, 2016*. Participation to the event is capped at about 50 participants and we expect to have a number of open slots for applicants:

- if you were pre-invited and have already filled in a form, you will receive a separate note from the organizers - if you have not been invited but you would like to participate, please fill in this application form http://goo.gl/forms/Yv6rve2wCt to give us some information about you and your interest and expected contribution to the event.

Please help us pass this on to anyone who has done important technical work on Wikimedia references and citations.

*Important dates*

- *March 29, 2016*: applications open - *April 11, 2016*: applications close - *April 15, 2016*: notifications of acceptance are issued (if you applied for a travel grant, we'll be able to confirm by this date if we can cover the costs of your trip)

For any question, you can contact the organizing committee: wikicite@wikimedia.org

The organizers,

Dario Taraborelli Jonathan Dugan Lydia Pintcher Daniel Mietchen Cameron Neylon

*Dario Taraborelli *Head of Research, Wikimedia Foundation wikimediafoundation.org • nitens.org • @readermeter http://twitter.com/readermeter