for the project to identify and expand description of these artists while respecting their self-determined identities.103
How Can an Institution Get Started Improving the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion of Wikidata?
To address gaps in Wikidata coverage, institutions can:
- Add descriptions to existing collections with biases because of how and when they were described, to include more diverse identities from sets integrated in Wikidata or other related sets.
- Create authorities, using Wikidata, for missing identities within existing collections, to increase the reliability of Wikimedia projects.
- Use Wikidata as a mechanism for connecting data sets focused on underrepresented groups or marginalized collections.
- Engage scholars working in underrepresented knowledge areas, such as non-Western, colonized, or other marginalized knowledge, to help extend existing sets of knowledge in Wikidata.
Community Outreach and Training
The Wikimedia community has a long history of collaborating with and training librarians to participate in Wikimedia projects.104 Much of the collaboration has centered around holding community-facing Wikipedia events in libraries supporting outreach, digital literacy, or other skill-based work—and the library community is beginning to see Wikidata and Wikibase skills being shared in workshop and edit-a-thon settings similar to those used with Wikipedia. For example, the 2017 Canadian Music Edit-a-thon series included Wikidata integration.
There are also themed communities in Wikidata that can catalyze public contribution, and there is value in bringing actors beyond the “library metadata” workers into thinking and caring about metadata.
