Wikidata and Libraries: Facilitating Open Knowledge

Abstract

Libraries and archives are increasingly embracing the value of contributing information to open knowledge projects. Users come to Wikipedia—one of the best-known open knowledge projects—to learn about a specific topic or for quick fact checking. Even more serious researchers use it as a starting point for finding links to external resources related to their topic of interest. Wikipedia is just one of the many projects under the umbrella of the Wikimedia Foundation, a nonprofit charitable organization. Wikidata, for its part, is a sister project to Wikipedia. It stores structured data that is then fed back to the other Wiki projects, including Wikipedia, thus providing users with the most up-to-date information. This chapter focuses on Wikidata and its potential uses for libraries. We hope to inspire information professionals (librarians, archivists, library practitioners) to take the next step and start a conversation with their institutions and colleagues to free their data by contributing it to an open knowledge base like Wikidata.