Content Partnerships Hub/Metabase

Content Partnerships Hub

Improving the Wikimedia movement’s work with content partners

Metabase

White paper on Metabase
Introduction Setting up a Wikibase from scratch Metabase for chapter data Metabase for the global movement

What is Metabase?

Metabase is a wiki, a linked, structured knowledge base hosted on Wikibase Cloud, developed by Wikimedia Sverige as part of the Content Partnerships Hub initiative.

The goal of Metabase is to collect information about the activities done and the resources produced by the international Wikimedia movement, with an initial focus on resources connected to content partnerships. Wikimedia Sverige is using the topic of content partnerships as it's both vast and relevant to many actors in the Wikimedia movement, and also has a natural connection to our capacity building efforts within the planned Content Partnerships Hub.

Metabase should enable everyone to answer questions like:

What art museums in Europe have done joint projects with Wikimedia affiliates?
At what non-Wikimedia conferences have Wikimedians spoken about GLAM partnerships?
What educational material in English or German is there for large scale uploads of image files to Wikimedia Commons?

In order to achieve this, Metabase stores information about things such as:

conferences and sessions in them,
edit-a-thons, meet-ups and other events,
educational materials (tutorials, articles, videos),
campaigns, projects, competitions and other movement initiatives,
documents and reports produced by affiliates about their work, such as white papers, slide decks.

The development of Metabase is partially funded by a Movement Strategy Implementation Grant. The work that has been done so far has had three focus areas, which correspond to the three case studies in this white paper:

Metabase was launched in October 2022. WMSE has since been developing a foundational data set, with a focus on content partnerships, to exemplify the goals and scope of the platform. We hope that the community – affiliates and volunteers alike – will join the platform and contribute to it.

The initial setup and modeling was done by two employees of Wikimedia Sverige, with several years' worth of knowledge of both Wikidata and the chapter's operations. They had edited the chapter's wiki extensively and were familiar with its structure and content. Later on, we hired another staff member whose task was to start filling Metabase with content. The new staff member was an experienced Wikimedian, but was new to our wiki. We were interested in how they would handle the initial modeling built up by us, as we expected our target users – affiliate staff and other Wikimedians around the world – would face similar challenges when making their first contributions.

Project overview

Metabase was launched in October 2022. WMSE has since been developing a foundational data set, with a focus on content partnerships, to exemplify the goals and scope of the platform. We hope that the community – affiliates and volunteers alike – will join the platform and contribute to it.

The initial setup and modeling was done by two employees of Wikimedia Sverige, with several years' worth of knowledge of both Wikidata and the chapter's operations. They had edited the chapter's wiki extensively and were familiar with its structure and content. Later on, we hired another staff member whose task was to start filling Metabase with content. The new staff member was an experienced Wikimedian, but was new to our wiki. We were interested in how they would handle the initial modeling built up by us, as we expected our target users – affiliate staff and other Wikimedians around the world – would face similar challenges when making their first contributions.

The problem we are trying to solve

A commonly highlighted problem limiting capacity building in the Wikimedia movement has been the lack of findability of existing resources such as training material, reports, and case studies. They are spread out across the internet, in different forms and in different languages. There's our own platforms: Meta Wiki, Wikimedia Commons, the various Wikipedias and the affiliates' own wikis, such as Wikimedia Sverige's, but also a plethora of websites, blogs, YouTube channels, e-learning platforms and other online venues. That's the power of the Wikimedia movement – people all around the world share their knowledge and experience. But it's not easy to know what's out there and what's most relevant to one's needs.

Our hope is that Metabase will be able to help to alleviate this issue by improving searchability and findability of the knowledge and experience of the Wikimedia Movement.

Target audience

To better be able to understand the different use cases for Metabase – what data has most value and what support will be needed – a number of personas have been developed. They are based on real people, but are generalized to be more broadly representative of staff in the Wikimedia movement. The focus here is on how the person should be able to use the platform and consume the information, not how they can contribute with structured information on Metabase.

The document can be read in full in Metabase. It is intended to both help the Metabase team to prioritize what material to include and what type of support and documentation that should be provided. The personas are based on WMSE's staff and we imagine that other affiliates will recognize themselves in them.

Wikidata vs. Wikibase

Why did we choose to build our knowledge base in a separate Wikibase instance rather than hosting the data in Wikidata? After all, Wikidata already contains considerable amounts of data about the work of the Wikimedia movement, such as the affiliates, projects, conferences and even single events. We have looked at several aspects of Wikidata as it relates to the data in our scope.

Benefits of Wikidata

Visibility and integration – data hosted on Wikidata benefits from immediate integration into a globally recognized, centralized knowledge base. Serving as a hub for the Wikimedia platforms, Wikidata enables seamless linking to the other platforms, like all the Wikipedia language versions, Meta Wiki, Wikimedia Commons and the many affiliate wikis. However, we can combine data from Wikidata and a Wikibase Cloud instance in SPARQL using federation.

Ease of use for editors – Wikidata has a large number of user scripts and extensions which make data input more efficient. Tools like OpenRefine can be used for large-scale data editing. Wikibase Cloud is a sandboxed environment which does not support user scripts, extensions or custom CSS. You can run your own OpenRefine reconciliation service for Wikibase Cloud, but setting it up requires a certain level of technical expertise.

Infrastructure – Wikidata contains over 11,000 properties, as well as all the support items we could imagine, such as countries, places, event types etc. In Metabase, they all need to be created from scratch, which is time-consuming.

Drawbacks of Wikidata

Ontology – in a new Wikibase instance, all the modeling has to be done from scratch. On the one hand, it requires a considerable time investment; on the other hand, it gives you flexibility and freedom to experiment and customize your ontology to your needs, especially when it comes to properties. To create a new property in Wikidata, you have to publish a proposal which is then up to discussion for the community. A property like WMSE project ID, which is central to the operations of Wikimedia Sverige, could probably not be created in Wikidata.

Notability – arguably the most important aspect. As members of the Wikimedia movement, it's easy for us to fall into the trap of assuming that everything we do is notable enough to be put in the Wikimedia projects – our own projects. However, the notability criteria limit what Movement-internal things should get their own items; for example: "Status of pages in Meta-Wiki, MediaWiki.org, Wikimania and other supported special Wikimedia sites is undetermined. They should be discussed in [sic] a case-by-case basis." This is relevant to us, as it means that our meet-ups and other events, which are often documented in those wikis, have unclear notability status in Wikidata. While we might think that every event organized by WMSE should be notable, in reality, a Wikimedia affiliate is just a small organization. A meet-up or a project organized by, say, a local birding club, and not described by any external sources, would not be notable enough for Wikidata (in fact, meet-ups limited to users of one wiki are specifically excluded from Wikidata, which makes it clear that an activity aimed at Swedish-speaking Wikipedians are not notable). Neither are many of the documents that we, the movement, publish, such as final reports, slides or tutorials.

In the end, the notability aspect, along with the flexibility of creating our own properties and ontology, was the most important factor leading to the creation of Metabase. At the same time, compatibility with Wikidata has constantly been on our mind. For this reason, we tried to copy the properties and modeling practices of Wikidata to the greatest extent possible, only creating Metabase-unique properties if we really felt they were necessary (such as WMSE project ID). It makes both our data input and federation with Wikidata easier, and it lowers the threshold for onboarding new Metabase contributors – even if the P-identifiers are not the same, and may or may not be memorized (some experienced Wikidatans have developed an uncanny ability to learn and recall strings of numbers), the underlying concepts are familiar. While we cannot predict the future of Metabase after, hopefully, the community takes it over and starts actively using it to fulfill their own needs, some sort of integration with Wikidata is not impossible at some point further along.

Self-hosted Wikibase instance vs. Wikibase Cloud

Wikimedia Sverige has been working with Wikidata for many years, mainly supporting our partners – GLAMs, public agencies and other actors interested in exploring and contributing to the free linked data ecosystem. For a long time, we have also been aware of organizations and individuals setting up their own Wikibase instances to fulfill their specific needs. One prominent example is the collaboration between the German National Library and Wikimedia Deutschland, aimed at evaluating the suitability of Wikibase as a platform for authority data. We have also seen a growing interest in Wikibase among smaller GLAMs who are looking for a solution to manage their data. There is clearly a need for support and advice for organizations who want to implement Wikibase, and Wikimedia Sverige is uniquely positioned to provide it, as we are experts in Linked Open Data and have a broad contact network among cultural heritage institutions.

On the other hand, a common theme in conversations about Wikibase projects is that setting up your instance is not as easy as it should be, and the documentation available does not address everyone's concerns. A self-hosted Wikibase instance provides full control over the infrastructure and configuration, enabling the users to customize their setup extensively, integrating specific extensions and modifying the user interface according to their requirements. However, this option is suitable for organizations with robust technical expertise and resources, as it involves managing servers, ensuring security, running updates, and handling backups. The expertise and resources it requires might be out of reach for, for instance, the small GLAMs that might benefit from it the most.

For this reason, the launch of Wikibase Cloud was a welcome development. Wikibase Cloud makes it possible for anyone to launch their own Wikibase instance on a remote server, which greatly simplifies the deployment and maintenance of the platform. The standardized environment it provides may limit some customization compared to a self-hosted instance, which we will elaborate upon later, but it ensures reliability and scalability, without having to have and manage your own server. Without the need for IT expertise, it empowers more people to manage their linked data in a Wikidata-like environment. And if they at some point decide their needs have grown beyond Wikibase Cloud, it's possible to export the structure content to a self-hosted Wikibase instance.

With this in mind, the development of Metabase also has a secondary goal – evaluating Wikibase Cloud as an all-in-one, batteries-included solution for organizations, like GLAMs, who seek our advice about linked data platforms. By setting up and developing Metabase, Wikimedia Sverige is getting hands-on experience with the software, which we will hopefully be able to use when working with our partners.