WikiCite 2018/Program/Lih

Title: Tutorial 1: Wikidata 101 & data modeling

Who should attend

If you've picked up Wikidata in bits in pieces and have never sat down to learn it from top to bottom, or if you want to learn about Wikidata's capabilities in the context of citations, bibliographical data and federated search, this session is for you.

Abstract

This tutorial is a gentle introduction to Wikidata, the free and open knowledge base that can be read and edited by both humans and machines. Wikidata acts as central storage for the structured data of its Wikimedia sister projects including Wikipedia and has seen increasing acceptance in the LAM space.

We will cover the basics of how Wikidata works as an RDF triple-store, and explain the crucial policies that make Wikidata work, such as its notability standard and how it differs from Wikipedia.

We will cover many of the tools shown but perhaps not explained during the first day of WikiCite such as:

Wikidata Query
Mix'n'Match
Quickstatements
TABernacle
Wikidata Graph Builder
Federated searches

We will demonstrate how Wikidata can be used in the context of citations and how to discover and experiment with what Wikidata has so far. The Wikidata In Brief (one pager) will also be introduced as a roadmap for continued Wikidata work.

Bio

Andrew Lih

Digital media strategist, Wikidata trainer and author of The Wikipedia Revolution, based in Washington D.C.

Andrew Lih is a digital media strategist, journalist and author of The Wikipedia Revolution: How a bunch of nobodies created the world’s greatest encyclopedia and a noted expert in online collaboration, digital news innovation and the collaborative knowledge projects. He has led Wikidata training with the Smithsonian Institution, Library of Congress, OCLC, Museum Computer Network and many organizations in the cultural sector of libraries, archives and museums.

He was the recipient of the U.S. National Archives Citizen Archivist of the Year (2016) award and Knight Foundation grants for his work with Wikipedia and cultural institutions. He has been a professor of journalism at the University of Southern California, American University and the University of Hong Kong, and started the new media program at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1995. His multimedia reporting of China and the 2008 Summer Olympics has appeared in the Wall Street Journal newspaper and web site. He is the co-founder of the Digimentors consulting group, which has worked with the Pulitzer Prizes, Global Teacher Prize and the United Nations on teaching and implementing social and digital media strategies.

A veteran of AT&T Bell Laboratories, he was the founder of one of the first web startups in 1994, NY.com, which was the first web-based New York City guide. He has been a speaker at South by Southwest (SXSW), the Online News Association, TEDx and Wikimania and his work and commentary has appeared in outlets such as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Quartz and The Washington Post.

Pronouns: he / him.