content through focused drives, such as those implemented by the Art+Feminism (focused on women in the arts), Women in Red (focused on missing women in English Wikipedia), WikiMujeres (a group focused on representation of women in Spanish Wikipedia), and AfroCrowd (outreach to people of African descent) initiatives. These community-led Wikimedia initiatives focus on diversity of representation of people included in the projects and connected to other data sources. By populating Wikidata with content about these individuals, and then supporting collaborative initiatives coming out of the Wikimedia community, libraries have an opportunity to engage networks of activists in fully documenting and describing these communities.
There are still considerable gaps in Wikidata content, but the Wikimedia movement’s commitment to knowledge equity as part of the 2030 Wikimedia movement direction, and recent trends in organizing within the Wikimedia movement, suggest that a growing global community of practice is forming around using Wikidata to document marginalized knowledge.93 Library and other institutional metadata is an important foundation for building out that growing data set to address these issues.
Several institutions are already developing projects that leverage Wikidata to better connect resources from external sites with content within the Wikimedia ecosystem to create an emergent and dynamically growing body of knowledge. For example, the Smithsonian’s American Women’s History Initiative94 will be building on existing crowdsourcing and research efforts to identify women in their collections through open data practices that rely on Wikidata. These efforts will help the Smithsonian better understand what is already documented in their metadata by providing the crowdsourced context and will make it easier to surface the identified resources. Practically, this community-centered approach to enriching data should open up a number of opportunities for dynamically enriched explorations of women in the Smithsonian’s collection.
