Wikidata: Recruiting the Crowd to Power Access to Digital Archives

Abstract

The web is the first stop for information seekers. As holders of the world’s cultural artifacts, cultural heritage organizations possess important information about the world throughout history. However, much of this is “locked down” unless information seekers make the effort to visit institutional websites. As a sector, we haven’t yet made our resources and scholarship accessible in the online spaces that knowledge seekers frequent. When Wikipedia launched in 2001, no one could have predicted its place today as the largest and most-used crowd-sourced encyclopedia in the world. As Wikipedia and its sister projects have taken the place as the gateway to the World Wide Web, cultural heritage organizations need to reconcile its place in the online information space. With the emergence of Wikidata, the central storage for structured data of Wikimedia sister projects, in 2012, cultural heritage organizations have the opportunity to “get on the ground floor” of leveraging their data in a free and open repository. This paper will look at how cultural heritage organizations can work with Wikidata, positioning themselves to become a more useful and accessible knowledge resource to the world.