Welcome to your Wikidata course Dashboard! This Dashboard page is where you'll find both basic and detailed information about the course, including a timeline. Each week details the meeting agenda, milestones, and tasks to complete by the following week. Some weeks also have optional additional exercises or resources that you may find useful. From the Home tab (where you are now), you will only see the current week of the Dashboard. You can click the "Timeline" tab above to see the full schedule. 

Wiki Education built this tool for use by instructors and students contributing to Wikipedia for a class assignment, and we have adapted it for our Wikidata course. We will talk more about the Dashboard and everything it does during our first meeting.

After each session, I will post recordings to their corresponding week in addition to emailing the link out to the group. You can always come back and review a past session if you forgot something or miss a session.

We will use two additional communication platforms: Slack and Zoom.

Slack is a chat/messaging service you can access via web or app. You will receive an invitation in the first week. Wiki Education staff are in the Slack channel during normal business hours. Since this is a virtual course, we want to ensure that you can ask a question whenever it comes up and receive an answer as quickly as possible. We find Slack is a great tool for this. In your settings, please ensure that your "display name" is set to the name you wish to be called. Please do not use a pseudonym on Slack. The only people who can see our Slack channel are course participants and Wiki Education staff.

Zoom is our virtual classroom. Every Wednesday at 11:00 AM Pacific Time we will have a 1 hour group meeting via Zoom. Click this link to join (note that the link remains the same throughout the course): https://zoom.us/j/703677394

If you wish to connect by phone, you can find links to the iOS or Android app on the zoom.us website. If you cannot use the app, you can also dial in by phone, calling either (646)558-8656 or (669)900-6833 and using meeting ID 703-677-394. Please note that if you dial in, you will not be able to use video, and will miss screensharing. If you have trouble connecting, please join the Slack channel and ping Ian for help.

Staff contact information:

Will Kent, Wikidata Program Manager - will@wikiedu.org, @will on Slack

Ian Ramjohn, Wikidata Expert - ian@wikiedu.org, @ian on Slack

You can reach us (and other Wiki Education staff) through the Get Help button at the top right corner of this page.

•  Create a Wikidata account
  • Consider whether or not you want to use a pseudonym or a version of your real name. Remember that all Wikidata contributions are public and saved indefinitely, including mistakes. Using a pseudonym is a good idea, but it's not required. It's possible to change your username later..
  • Associate your account with an email address. Other editors will be able to send emails to you, but your address will *not* be publicly visible. Email is the only way to recover an account should you forget the password.

Learning objectives for Week 1:

• define and explore what Wikidata is
• understand the basic parts of Wikidata
• become familiar with Wikidata's interface

This week we will cover some of the essential technology and software for this course. This includes the Dashboard, Slack, and Zoom. Wikidata is a community project, so we will also devote part of our first session to introducing ourselves. Be prepared to share what you do and what drew you to this course/Wikidata/linked data. Do you have a research background? What are you looking to get out of this course? What drew you to this course? What's one thing you feel confident about regarding Wikidata and what's one thing you dont' feel so confident about?

Discussion: How is Wikidata's interface organized? What makes Wikidata so special? What are our course goals?

Throughout this course we will assign trainings that will guide you through specific Wikidata skills. Before next week's meeting, work through the "Introduction to Wikidata" and "Linked Data and Databases" trainings. You will take other training modules throughout the course. If you would like to go through others now, you can see them all here: Training modules. 

You may notice that we have several Wikipedia trainings for our other programs. We will not cover Wikipedia content in this course, but you are welcome to take these trainings. They are open and free to everyone.

For next week please assign yourself a few items and familiarize yourself with them. Take note of their properties, identifiers, and look at the Discussion tab (if there is one for your item). Also examine some properties that are of interest to you. Try to understand how they work and how editors are using them. 

Consider what's included and what is missing. Are there references? What properties were you surprised to see? What properties do you think should be included that arent' already?

To assign yourself an item, first make sure you're logged in to the Dashboard. Next go to the "Editors" tab of the Dashboard. Click on "add an article" next to your name and copy/paste the Wikidata URL and click "assign." You can add the whole URL or just the Q-number (ex. Q100 should assign you the city of Boston).

You can do this with as many items as you like!

Learning objectives for Week 2:

• establish some principles of how to evaluate data on Wikidata
• review and become more familiar with the basic concepts of Wikidata
• understand how to work with the Wikidata community

You may have started to notice some patterns with your item's statements. This week we will explore some variables that will help us understand data quality. Remember: since every item is unique, data quality will depend on what that exact item is. Understanding both *how* to describe something is as important as describing *where* that item belongs.

Discussion topics: Property usage information, where items fall within a class, and how to propose a proerty. Discuss emergent ontologies and parallel schemas (the bane and beauty of Wikidata). We will also introduce Recoin, a property recommendation tool.

We will also start to discuss the Wikidata community and how to best interact with other Wikidata editors.

Please evaluate the data of an item you have selected. Consider sources and properties that currently describe the item. Look at similar items to determine if your item is missing information. Use property discovery tools to add more statements. 

Take some notes and be ready to share your findings during our next sessions. We are building toward answering the question: what are ways we can improve data quality on Wikidata?

If you're interested in addressing content gaps (ie items that are not yet on Wikidata), consider different ways of identifying what's on Wikidata vs what isn't on Wikidata.

Learning objectives for Week 3:

• estabalish a deeper understanding of how the Wikidata community operates
• review the process and policies of adding data to Wikidata
• explore how queries fit in with getting information from Wikidata

Now that you understand parts of the Wikidata community and how to evaluate quality of Wikidata items, feel free to start editing items if you haven't already. Editing Wikidata is as important as using the data from Wikidata. Wikidata is only as good as the data within it. Being able to add new items and create items of structural importance to Wikidata is what is going to make it an even more useful resource for everyone.

Using the "showcase item" standard, try to ensure that your items have at least ten statements, complete with references. You're more than welcome to add more than ten statements.

We will demo some queries this week. I want to emphasize the results of the queries rather than spending time understanding how queries work.

Discussion:  What are some ways we could use queries to answer our data quality questions? How can we use queries to develop new insights based on what's in Wikidata? Where can you go to find queries?

Continue editing items. Don't forget to assign them to yourself as you edit. As you edit, consider projects that may be possible with Wikidata. We will start to develop these ideas as the course continues.

Wikidata is full of information. One of the most powerful ways to understand this information is through queries. Note: you do not need to learn SPARQL for this training.

Assignment: Take a look at some example queries. Don't worry about the code. Just observe the story the queries tell. What kind of data do the queries show? How do the queries represent the data visually? Start to consider what kinds of insights queries can provide from Wikidata. You should feel free to modify example queries to show something you're interested in.

Also consider what you could do with this kind of data. Next week be prepared to share your findings and observations about queries. Next week we will dive into how queries work.

If you're feeling adventurous, you can modify existing queries to provide you with different results.

Learning objectives for Week 4:

• use queries to pull information from Wikidata
• begin to understand how queries work (using SPARQL)
• being to understand the limits of querying (a query is only as good as a data model)

As we continue work with data models, querying, and familiarizing ourselves with Wikidata items and properties, start to think about how you could work with Wikidata at scale? What are some of the ways a collection could improve Wikidata? How do you see yourself fitting into this project? Teacher? Editor? Liaison?

Feel free to go back and review the module about the Wikidata community. Moving forward, interacting with the community will be very important to achieve what you want to do. We will shift our focus to some of the more social aspects of editing Wikidata.

Creating new properties, data models, and coordinating projects on Wikidata will require you to work with others. We will address some of these processes in our session today.

We're all editors! Now when you see something that isn't correct on Wikidata, go in there and fix it!

Consider how you could adapt a query to have it reveal insights about something important to you or your job. I can make recommendations if you need them. Spend some time modifying a query - switch out items or properties. Add new variables and try to out multiple visualizaitons. If you're feeling adventerous, feel free to write a query from scratch.

Queries are powerful because not only do they show you what is in Wikidata, but they can also show you what isn't. Consider different kinds of queries such as maitenence queries or queries that visualize information nicely.

Learning objectives for Week 5:

• learn how WikiProjects organize the community and evaluate data on Wikidata
• understand how WikiProjects synthesize what we have learned about querying and data models
• build off of all of our learning objectives so far to start to plan a Wikidata-relatd project

Join a WikiProject. Introduce yourself and what you are interested in working on. See if that particular WikiProject has a data model for the kinds of items that interest you. Based on our evaluation of data models last week, make some suggestions to what exists. If there is no data model, start one from scratch. Don't forget to leave a note for the rest of the WikiProject so they know what you're working on.

A query is only as good as the data model.

Now that you are familiar with editing items, additing properties, and references, it's time to share that knowledge with the rest of the community. Look at some data models for common items in your area of expertise and evaluate those data models. How accurate are they? What would you add? What would you remove? Do all the properties you want to add exist?

Join a WikiProject, propose a property, be an active Wikidata editor. Detail the ways you can be an editor. What else do you need to complete a project (or identify future projects)?

What are some of the things that excite you about Wikidata now that you are a month into this course? What are some challenges? What are some things you would like to see?

We will look at some specific tools and Wikidata initiatives in today's session. Although these tools will not be useful for everyone, they may be helpful in the future.