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A Perspective on Wikidata: Ecosystems, Trust, and Usability
The document discusses the role of Wikidata in cultural heritage, emphasizing its ecosystem, trust issues, and usability challenges. It highlights Wikidata as a centralized platform for open data, raising concerns about accuracy, change, and community norms. Additionally, it points out the potential for Wikidata to enhance cultural knowledge through detailed information and relationships.
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A Perspective on Wikidata: Ecosystems, Trust, and Usability
- 1. Wikidata and Cultural Heritage robert. sanderson @yale.edu @azaroth42 A Perspective onWikidata: Ecosystems, Trust and Usability Robert Sanderson Director for Cultural Heritage Metadata Yale University robert.sanderson@yale.edu PCC Forum, 12th November 2021
- 2. Wikidata and Cultural Heritage robert. sanderson @yale.edu @azaroth42 Overview Ecosystems: Standards, Systems,Community “single, centralized platform” (3 minutes) Trust: Accuracy, Model, Norms “crowd-sourced” (4 minutes) Usability: LOUD, Structure, Use? “integration into workflows” (3 minutes)
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- 4. Wikidata and Cultural Heritage robert. sanderson @yale.edu @azaroth42 Ecosystems - Systems Wikidatais a single, centralized system: • Technology dependent (wikibase, “unique” snak format) • Ontology is only internal (Pxxx properties) • Vocabulary is only internal (Q instances) • Doesn’t try to be part of the web, only on the web • Does provide identifiers for the entity in existing systems Wikidata is the Facebook of Metadata
- 5. Wikidata and Cultural Heritage robert. sanderson @yale.edu @azaroth42 Ecosystems - Community Isthere concern about wikidata establishing a “monopoly on open data”? • You can’t compete with free; first to market advantage • Concerted branding/differentiation effort from Wikimedia to establish “wikimedians” rather than “contributors” • Is there oxygen left for discussions about perhaps better ways to do this?
- 6. Wikidata and Cultural Heritage robert. sanderson @yale.edu @azaroth42 Trust - Accuracy Usingwikidata is not a issue of control, it’s an issue of trust. Accuracy – Does the data appropriately describe reality? Trust – Will it continue to do so in the future? Trust is hard given the data is open and constantly changing. How will the reputation of your organization be affected (positively or negatively) by using constantly changing data?
- 7. Wikidata and Cultural Heritage robert. sanderson @yale.edu @azaroth42 Trust – Lackof Model The data model is incoherent due to constant change and crowd sourcing. E.g. Yale Art Gallery (Q1568434) is a: Place Organization Building Collection
- 8. Wikidata and Cultural Heritage robert. sanderson @yale.edu @azaroth42 Trust – Norms Whatshould be described in wikidata, by whom? • “Notability” requirement • Wikipedia derived rules: e.g. can’t describe yourself • Extremely inconsistent enforcement
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- 10. Wikidata and Cultural Heritage robert. sanderson @yale.edu @azaroth42 Usability – Ontologyand Data Some challenges, beyond the “unique” format: • Properties are just identifiers (“P31”) not named (“type”) • Records are flat … apart from qualifiers and references • Which solve two issues, but not all • Constantly changing records and ontology • Without an effective synchronization mechanism • Non-traditional conflation of ontology and vocabulary together as instance data
- 11. Wikidata and Cultural Heritage robert. sanderson @yale.edu @azaroth42 Usability – Use? Whatcan we use wikidata for? • Source of external identifiers! • Source of names in different languages • More specific information, e.g. date not year • Relationships to other entities Wikidata is great for augmenting cultural knowledge with details and relationships beyond traditional catalogs
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Editor's Notes
- #4 B for trying.
- #5 Or is that the Meta of Metadata. I’m just as confused as you.
- #7 BBC example. Impossible to know what changes will come. Today inaccuracy is mostly well-intentioned robots making poorly coded judgements. Matt Miller adding LC identifiers for places
- #8 Duplicates, Permanent Duplicates, no separation between classes and instances. How can we expect data of sufficient quality for use, when there’s no distinction between these different entities?
- #9 And it did not end there I don’t trust a system where the norms say I cannot describe myself. This is an innocuous case, but you can imagine many similar scenarios that would be very damaging to have information available, or not available.
- #10 Usability of the data is determined by the audience, and for data that is the software developer.