Wikidata and research/Call

Important dates

15.10.2024 Launch of the Call for Papers
09.12.2024 Deadline for submissions
06.02.2025 Notification of acceptance / rejection
By 17.02.2025 Deadline to confirm the participation in presence
01.03.2025 Registration opening
21.04.2025 Submission of the full papers
05-06.06.2025 Conference dates

Introduction

The conference Wikidata and Research wants to explore and trigger the synergies between academia and the Wikimedia projects, with a specific focus on open data, collaborative open research infrastructures and research assessment.

Wikidata and Research

Wikidata https://www.wikidata.org is a free open multidisciplinary and multilingual knowledge base that can be read and edited by both humans and machines. It is the central storage of structured data for the Wikimedia projects (including Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons and Wikisource), and it is a research infrastructure, providing and hosting open data, and supporting new analysis and visualisation.

With more than 113 million items Wikidata has become a hub of the Linked Data Cloud that connects open datasets shared by volunteers, researches, cultural and public institutions from all over the world. It also provides support to many other sites and services beyond the Wikimedia projects. The content of Wikidata is available under the open tool Creative Commons Zero - CC0, can be exported using standard formats and can be interlinked to other open datasets on the linked data web.

All these features make Wikidata a key infrastructure for scientific research and for the implementation of Open Science. Scientific research can contribute to the publication of open data but can also benefit from the use of open data published in Wikidata and the collaboration with its communities. The comparison between datasets produced by research projects, archives, libraries and museums and the LOD Cloud can bring out recurrences, new relationships and infer new knowledge (data mining and evidence based approach). It is also a way to improve data quality and enrich the datasets with links to other databases, in an interdisciplinary perspective. Scholars can collaborate with volunteers, join the Wikidata communities and receive support from other active contributors, opening research to new collaborations and confrontation, developing new strategies and tools, and sharing methodologies at an interdisciplinary and international level.

Wikibase is the open source software used by Wikidata. Everyone can create their own Wikibase instance downloading directly Wikibase or, since 2022, using the platform Wikibase Cloud <https://www.wikibase.cloud/>, which allows to create up to six Wikibase instances per account; these instances are hosted on the servers of Wikimedia Deutschland.

Key topics

The conference’s themes include but are not limited to:

Methods and data management. Research strategies and Data Management Plans that use Wikidata and/or other Wikibase instances as key platforms for research data.
Sharing datasets. Case studies related to importing datasets (including datasets related to GLAMs and education) to Wikidata and/or other Wikibase instances, dealing with the methods and the tools used, the challenges of the process and the potentialities in terms of data analysis and reuse.
Reuse of data. Case studies in any discipline (environmental data, medical data, heritage, archival and bibliographic data, biographical datasets...), completed or still ongoing, involving the use of Wikidata and/or other Wikibase instances to collect, extract, relate, and discover data.
Data visualisations and tools. Visualizations and tools based on Wikidata and/or other Wikibase instances created or used by institutions, researchers and research projects.
Research assessment. Altmetrics based on Wikidata to evaluate scientific research and research impact.
Projects and proposals. Projects and proposals focusing on research and Wikidata and/or other Wikibase instances.
Overviews. Analysis of the use of Wikidata in research related to specific disciplinary areas or topics.

Selected bibliography

Mora-Cantallops, Marçal, Salvador Sánchez-Alonso, and Elena García-Barriocanal. 2019. «A Systematic Literature Review on Wikidata». Data Technologies and Applications 53 (3): 250–68. https://doi.org/10.1108/DTA-12-2018-0110.
Shenoy, Kartik, Filip Ilievski, Daniel Garijo, Daniel Schwabe, and Pedro Szekely. 2022. «A Study of the Quality of Wikidata». Journal of Web Semantics 72:100679. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.websem.2021.100679.
Turki, Houcemeddine, Mohamed Ali Hadj Taieb, Mohamed Ben Aouicha, Lane Rasberry, and Daniel Mietchen. 2024. «Ten Years of Wikidata: A Bibliometric Study». In Proceedings of the Wikidata Workshop 2023 co-located with 22nd International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2023). Athens: CEUR. https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3640/paper13.pdf.
Vrandečić, Denny, Lydia Pintscher, and Markus Krötzsch. 2023. «Wikidata: The Making Of». In Companion Proceedings of the ACM Web Conference 2023, 615–24. Austin TX USA: ACM. https://doi.org/10.1145/3543873.3585579.
Waagmeester, Andra, Gregory Stupp, Sebastian Burgstaller-Muehlbacher, Benjamin M. Good, Malachi Griffith, Obi L. Griffith, Kristina Hanspers, et al. 2020. «Wikidata as a Knowledge Graph for the Life Sciences». eLife 9 (marzo). https://doi.org/10.7554/elife.52614.
Zhao, Fudie. 2023. «A Systematic Review of Wikidata in Digital Humanities Projects». Digital Scholarship in the Humanities 38 (2): 852–74. https://doi.org/10.1093/llc/fqac083.

Call for abstracts

Authors can submit proposals by December 9th, 2024 using Wikidata and Research 2025 Conference on OpenReview.net at the url:

https://openreview.net/group?id=wikimedia.it/Wikidata_and_Research/2025/Conference

We recommend to be aware of OpenReview's moderation policy for newly created profiles in the Call for Papers:

New profiles created without an institutional email will go through a moderation process that can take up to two weeks.
New profiles created with an institutional email will be activated automatically.

The accepted submissions will be copied on Meta-wiki by the organisers (https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikidata_and_research).

The submission form requires to provide the following information:

Title
Name of author(s), with ORCID if possible
Affiliation(s)
Keywords
Author(s) biography: max 300 words
Author(s) bibliography (optional): max 3 relevant papers/projects for each author
Abstract (max 500 words)
Theme
Format of the submission
Language of the presentation (English, Italian or possibility to present in both languages)
Confirmation of the physical presence in Florence of at least one of the authors for papers and lightening talks
Authorization to release the proposal with the double license CC BY 4.0 and CC BY-SA 4.0
Authorization to use the personal data for the purpose of the conference organization by Wikimedia Italia, according to its privacy policy
Acceptance of the Wikimedia Universal code of conduct and Wikimedia friendly space policy

Accepted formats

Individual papers. 20 minutes presentations. Indicated for in-depth analysis. In English or Italian.
Lightning talks. 5 minutes presentations. Specifically relevant for case studies, presentation of tools, proposal of new projects. In English or Italian.
Poster session. In English.

Participation

For individual papers and lightning talks, at least one author must be physically at the conference to present it.

Languages

The conference will have presentations in Italian and in English. In the submission form please specify if your presentation will be in English or Italian or if you can present in both languages.

Licenses

Proposals have to be released under CC BY 4.0 (recommended) or CC BY-SA 4.0, unless specifically requested.

Abstracts, slides, papers and posters are made available under the CC BY 4.0 or or CC BY-SA 4.0 license. Datasets are recommended to be provided and made available under CC0 1.0.

Sessions will be streamed and recorded and released under CC BY-SA 4.0 license, unless otherwise specifically requested.

Photos of the conference will be released under the CC BY 4.0 or CC BY-SA 4.0 license and uploaded on Wikimedia Commons. Participants are invited to share their relevant images of the conference on Wikimedia Commons. Please inform the registration desk if you do not want to be photographed.

Publication opportunities

A selection of the conference proceedings with datasets will be published in an open access edited ebook by Firenze University Press.

Location

The conference takes place in Florence, Italy at the Università degli Studi di Firenze / University of Florence. The two-days conference will use different venues of the university located in two different areas of the city.

5 June 2025: Aula magna del Rettorato, Università degli Studi di Firenze, Piazza San Marco 4, 50121 Firenze. 1 track.
6 June 2025: Campus di Novoli, Università degli Studi di Firenze, via delle Pandette, 50127 Firenze. 2 tracks and poster session.

Fees

Registration is free. Please note that at least one of the authors of the paper must be physically at the conference to present it.

Evaluation criteria

Compliance of the proposal with the conference’s themes
Scientific quality of the proposal
Originality of the proposal
Impact on the Wikimedia or academic communities

We aspire to have a diversity of research fields represented in the conference.

For further information please contact <conference@wikimedia.it>.

Scientific committee

Iolanda Pensa, SUPSI University of Applied Sciences and Arts of Southern Switzerland
Elena Marangoni, Wikimedia Italia
Camillo Carlo Pellizzari di San Girolamo, Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa
Silvia Bruni, Università di Firenze
Monica Berti, Universität Leipzig
Franco Bagnoli, Università di Firenze
Carlo Bianchini, Università di Pavia
Alessandra Boccone, Università degli Studi di Salerno
Antonella Buccianti, Università di Firenze
Dimitri D’Andrea, Università di Firenze
Annick Farina, Università di Firenze
Fulvio Guatelli, Università di Firenze
Luca Martinelli, Wikimedia Foundation
Alessio Melandri, Wikimedia Italia
Daniel Mietchen, FIZ Karlsruhe
Rossana Morriello, Università di Firenze
Federico Morando, Centro Nexa su Internet & Società del Politecnico di Torino
Maria Ranieri, Università di Firenze
Miriam Redi, Wikimedia Foundation
Lucia Sardo, Università di Bologna