The Gottesman Libraries is hosting a Wikidata Editathon focusing on the creation of entities about notable Teachers College alumni from underrepresented groups. This event is the start of a community of practice that aims to increase the visibility of those who have traditionally been overlooked by Western knowledge systems. 

Wikidata’s structured entries are important because they are used in other Wikimedia projects (e.g. Wikipedia, WikiCommons, etc.), library databases, and search engines such as Google to populate data. There the data found, or not found, in Wikidata has reverberations across the internet, reinforcing their structure. Scholarship has shown that data in Wikidata suffers from the same bias found in other systems of knowledge.

The Editathon will provide training and datasets for users to begin making their own edits. If you like you can bring your own list of notable alumni to work on! 

Please create a Wikidata user account in advance if you don’t already have one, and then register for this session on the event dashboard. We can also help with the account setup process during the event. 

What is an Editathon

An edit-a-thon is an online, in-person, or hybrid event where some editors of online communities come together to edit or improve data on a specific topic. The events typically include basic editing training for new editors and may be combined with a more general social meetup.

What is Wikidata

Wikidata is an open, multilingual structured knowledge base that can be read and edited by both humans and machines. Like Wikipedia, the free, multilingual online encyclopedia, Wikidata is part of Wikimedia, a global movement whose mission is to bring free educational content to the world. Wikidata is supported by a community of users who contribute facts to Wikidata, edit items, add references, build tools, develop rules and policies, and build ontologies. All content on Wikidata is available under a CC0 license. This means both the information and the data structures are in the public domain. You may freely use, share, and remix data that is CC0 licensed. Since Wikidata is linked, open, and structured, it encourages people to combine their own data with Wikidata resulting in a “database of databases”, and allowing for the use of tools to manipulate and interpret the data in a variety of ways.