Talk:FindingGLAMs/Minor grants/Wikidata, Librarians and Linked Open Data
Event Outcome edit
Report: Expected results, with SMART goals edit
- Start a conversation about opportunities around Wikidata for librarians
- The event was the first attempt by the Ghanaian Wikimedia community to engage a narrow group of professionals about a discussion on Wikidata. It was a learning experience for us, most especially the librarians. Some of them expressed deep appreciation for the opportunity to speak face-to-face with people involved with Wikipedia and by extension Wikidata.
- Our introduction to Wikipedia was one of the most interesting sessions of the workshop because the librarians literally held us hostage, to explain the controversies surrounding Wikipedia and its use in academia. While this workshop was not focused on Wikipedia, we ended up spending more than 30 minutes discussing and answering questions about Wikipedia alone.
- We found that the librarians were very fascinated with the open model of Wikidata, and many expressed interest to have us come to help them expose the doctoral theses they have in their collections.
- A few were however very reserved, stating that they were not convinced that Wikidata was a credible platform to house their repository’s metadata.
- The session about Scholia was also keenly followed by the participants. Many were surprised that Wikidata is able to show visually appealing profiles of the researchers they were dealing with from their universities.
- Establish a relationship between the Wikimedia community in Ghana and the library institutions that the attendees are affiliated with.
- This workshop was a major boost for the Wikidata community globally, because it served as leverage for us to receive another funding from WikiCite to host two side events at part of the 4th CARLIGH International Conference for researchers, faculty, librarians, ICT professionals, data analysts, publishers, book vendors, and other industry players, to be held in Ghana in July 2020.
- Number of participants - 25, excluding 5 volunteers
- In all, 31 people aside from the 5 facilitators showed up. Most of the 31 participants stayed on until the end of the program.
- Number of new editors - 25
- 27 of all participants were new editors.
- Number of items created or improved - 25
- 17 new items were created, and 2.61K items were edited in total. The project page can be found at: w.wiki/JEw