store. Investment in community infrastructure means less lock-in to proprietary platforms and systems.
A Wikibase implementation may be a sandbox or drafting environment that allows for ingestion and reconciliation of data sets before they are merged into Wikidata. Or a Wikibase implementation may be the end point for managing a particular set of data or project. Because the Wikibase software has only been readily available for independent deployment, many of the current examples of its deployment are experimental. There is a growing community of Wikibase adopters interested in running such experiments, identifying technical barriers to adoption, and facilitating increased feedback to the development of the software beyond its Wikidata application.
Wikibase Exemplars
- OCLC Linked Data Wikibase Prototype:91 Since 2017, OCLC has been collaborating with university research libraries to pilot the use of Wikibase as a sandbox environment for creating bibliographic and other metadata, and to explore its use in metadata reconciliation. The project has recently concluded, and its results will be shared in forthcoming conference presentations and a report.
- Enslaved.org: A Mellon-funded project from the Matrix Digital Humanities Center at Michigan State University, Enslaved.org uses Wikibase as a central platform for integrating discrete scholarly databases of slavery data. The goal of the project is to create a central platform to facilitate better research and storytelling about individual slave narratives as well as create tools for scholars to analyze and reflect on those sources.
- Rhizome, an arts organization based in New York City, has used Wikibase to document its collection of born-digital art and to practice digital preservation. Wikibase was chosen because it offers a flexible and customizable structure for both
