Ada Lovelace Day: Women in the Sciences Wikipedia Edit-a-thon: Wikidata

Wikidata is the structured database behind Wikipedia. It records data about Wikipedia articles in a machine-readable way, simplifying information access across its various language versions. This helps editors find scientists from countries or eras they care about that are not yet represented on their language's Wikipedia. Wikidata also powers data visualization tools like Scholia. By filling in missing information in Wikidata, you can help improve how computers understand Wikipedia articles!

Learn to edit Wikidata:

• Wikidata introduction
• Wikidata tour
• How to edit Wikdata: a step-by-step guide

There are so many things that can be improved on Wikidata! Here's a few places to start your editing journey where you will make an immediate impact.

• Add information to researchers

One of the largest problems with Wikidata's science and technology coverage is that there are hundreds of thousands of items for researchers where all Wikidata knows is that they are a human with an ORCID identifier. That's not very helpful for generating visualizations, analyzing data, or connecting articles to their authors!

Fixing Wikidata items with this issue is a great way to learn how to edit manually because the researcher's ORCID ID is often also completely empty, so there's a bit of internet research involved. We'll walk you through the basics below, and you can always ask a librarian if you need help! 

Click on this SPARQL query to get started.

Tip: Click on the "What links here" button on the left side of a researchers item to see if there are any papers attached to it! The institutional affiliation on the paper will help you learn more about them.

• Add subjects to journal articles

Journal articles sometimes don't appear in queries and visualization tools if they are missing a subject! Adding subjects to Wikidata items is one way to make scientists and their work easier for search engines and AI to understand.

Click on this SPARQL query to get started.

Tip: Don't just look at the title! The article's DOI is usually on the Wikidata item, so open it up in a new tab and read the abstract. Maybe the publisher even provided some keywords that you can use as a starting point.

• Add an identifier to a researcher

Mix&Match makes it easy to tell if scientist in an organization's database matches something that already exists in Wikidata. All you have to do is pick a catalog and determine if the person described in the data is the same as the person in Wikidata. Here's a few fun catalogs to try:

• IEEE
• Mathematics Genealogy Project
• ZBMath

You'll find a full list of science-related Mix&Match catalogs here.

Since Wikidata is such a huge database, a lot of people prefer to edit at scale using computer programs or other tools. However, you'll need an account that is at least 30 days old and 500 manual edits before you can use any of them, so go forth and make more edits!

If you have reached the 30 days/500 edits threshold, here are some tools you may find helpful:

• Author Disambiguator
  • Did you enjoy adding information to researchers while manual editing? Use this tool to connect authors to their articles!
• OpenRefine
  • This popular free data wrangling tool makes it easy to reconcile and import large datasets with Wikidata.
• QuickStatements
  • Not a fan of OpenRefine? This tool will let you upload changes as a csv.

Finally, it's possible to run scripts to edit large numbers of items automatically. If you are interested in this, please read the bot policy carefully and follow the approval process.

Remember, you are responsible for any edits you make, so please make large edits carefully!