Executive Summary
ARL and the Wikimedia Foundation have been in conversation about collaboration and mission alignment since 2015. Representatives from the two organizations held a summit at the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) conference in 2016 in Columbus, Ohio, and subsequently contributed to several white papers5 exploring additional opportunities to work together. The IFLA summit surfaced the following principal areas of interest:
- Using linked open data (LOD) to describe and connect resources, to mutually enrich Wikimedia and library discovery sources
- Establishing learning communities for Wikimedians in libraries, cultural heritage, and research institutions
- Librarians addressing the gaps in content and the cultural barriers inherent in Wikipedia, and conversely, using Wikimedia projects to help address cultural barriers in traditional library and archival practice
ARL charged a Task Force on Wikimedia and Linked Open Data in mid-2018 to focus on areas 1 and 3: linked open data and diversity & inclusion. In practice, this meant (1) focusing on Wikidata6 as a potential repository for libraries’ linked open data, and (2) that a significant use case driving the formation of the task force was a mutual interest between libraries7 and the Wikimedia community8 in creating culturally competent descriptive metadata in collaboration with communities whose lives, collections, and relationships are being described. When the task force was convened, it became clear that Wikibase9 (the infrastructure) and Wikidata (the community and the knowledge base) should also be explored explicitly in the context of ARL’s stated commitment to equitable and barrier-free scholarly communication.
Wikidata is a collaboratively edited knowledge base hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit organization that also hosts
