- modelling data and adding properties and qualifiers. Further, Rhizome needed highly specialized fields that may not have been appropriate for Wikidata.92
- Structured data on Wikimedia Commons: The Wikimedia Foundation, with the support of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, has invested in the integration of Wikibase into the backend metadata storage for its Wikimedia Commons platform. Commons, which contains 50 million files, including millions that come directly from GLAM institutions, has long stored metadata as free text.
How Can an Institution Get Started Implementing Wikibase?
- Explore how and why institutions and projects have decided to go with separate Wikibase installations.
- Provide server space and staff time from institutional developers in order to launch and support a deployment of a local Wikibase.
- Pilot linked data projects within the Wikibase environment before building or deploying custom platforms.
Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
Most collections in the library and broader GLAM community build on a number of assumptions about what constitutes valuable content. Though there is a growing attempt to increase representation and collection of underrepresented communities and knowledges in these collections, many of the descriptive practices that underpin collection catalogs and authorities don’t provide the full flexibility to break out of colonial and patriarchal assumptions.
Wikidata offers an opportunity to document and increase the visibility of collections and research materials about underrepresented populations. In the last half decade, the Wikimedia movement has invested energy in populating biographies of notable individuals, and in turn, increasing the diversity of people represented in that
