Community Data Mobilization in Wikidata: A paleontology perspective

Wikidata offers a centralized, accessible platform for working collaboratively to disambiguate entities, e.g., people associated with biodiversity collections, and mobilize information about them. This shared can be used improve connections across institutions individuals, augment local data records, encourage expertise-sharing. Over the past year, Paleo Data Working Group has organized several events bring movement paleontological collections. talk will share key products findings generated by these efforts, note parallels disciplines beyond paleontology. In global collections community, momentum been building leverage linked principles facilitate discovery using platform. An example of this is increasing adoption specifically purpose storing biographical because doing so facilitates who what work multiple institutions, impact (Groom et al. 2020, Güntsch 2021). March 2022, thirty participants gathered virtually participatory workshop, Using capture in paleontology . workshop was an introduction finding, editing, Wikidata, focusing on (e.g., collectors, researchers, staff) as subjects. Together, created or enhanced records around 100 individuals from list, including dozen female collectors previously known only their husbands’ names, “Mrs. Paul E. Drez,” we now know Nancy Sue Drez. At conclusion collaborated open-access document findings. The goal Guidelines Mobilize Information People Collections: A Paleontology Perspective (see Bauer 2022 repository) further uptake communities. first focused almost exclusively connected follow-up October entitled, collecting sites , significantly broadens scope exploring how community knowledge specimen events, such expeditions. Paleontological pose management challenge they tend detail rich, attached but stable identifier schemes, specimens curated institutions. Participants established defined collection site–including flagging aspects that may problematic publicly–and subsequently were able assess needs might, might not, fit into model Wikidata. These are particularly relevant where see trend towards sharing event-based perspective (Schindel Cook 2018, Robertson 2019), long norm specimens.