Knowledge curation work in Wikidata WikiProject discussions

Abstract

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to investigate how editors participate in Wikidata and how they organize their work.Design/methodology/approachThis qualitative study used content analysis of discussions involving data curation and negotiation in Wikidata. Activity theory was used as a conceptual framework for data collection and analysis.FindingsThe analysis identified six activities: conceptualizing the curation process, appraising objects, ingesting objects from external sources, creating collaborative infrastructure, re-organizing collaborative infrastructure and welcoming newcomers. Many of the norms and rules that were identified help regulate the activities in Wikidata.Research limitations/implicationsThis study mapped Wikidata activities to curation and ontology frameworks. Results from this study provided implications for academic studies on online peer-curation work.Practical implicationsAn understanding of the activities in Wikidata will help inform communities wishing to contribute data to or reuse data from Wikidata, as well as inform the design of other similar online peer-curation communities, scientific research institutional repositories, digital archives and libraries.Originality/valueWikidata is one of the largest knowledge curation projects on the web. The data from this project are used by other Wikimedia projects such as Wikipedia, as well as major search engines. This study explores an aspect of Wikidata WikiProject editors to the author’s knowledge has yet to be researched.