Page:ARL White Paper on Wikidata Opportunities and Recommendations.pdf/26

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  • by being radically open, following the "anyone can edit" model of contribution, it encourages the participation of a wider range of users.

Additionally, the Wikimedia community has continued to create tools, tutorials, and games to assist participants in acquiring the confidence and expertise to participate fully in the linked data creation process across skill levels.54 Wikibase promotes these same principles, supporting rapidly changing and growing data structures. This allows for the creation of linked data projects which aren't limited by the availability of technical skills—such as programming and data management—enabling broader participation by those with more expertise in the content itself.


The Culture and Policy Environment of Wikidata


The Wikidata community is as important an asset as the repository of data itself. The Wikidata project grows out of many of the same values that guide contributors in other Wikimedia projects. For example. Wikidata users embraced the importance of "verifiable"55 content within the data, building on the Wikipedia concept that in an ideal world, all facts presented could be substantiated through another source. Data quality is tied heavily to the idea that an original source provides the authority behind the information, which in practice differs from the Wikipedia practice of relying on authority from secondary or other published sources of information. Additionally, Wikidata allows for items to be created from a single external source—working around the barrier for inclusion of new marginalized topics in English Wikipedia, which requires representation of a topic in multiple sources.

Similarly, the consensus-driven approach to create policies, norms, and practices on Wikipedia has been brought in large part to Wikidata. For example, property creation (and thus the ontology of Wikidata) emerges as community members propose and then endorse the

ARL White Paper on Wikidata: Opportunities and Recommendations
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