GLAM/Newsletter/April 2018/Contents/Brazil report
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Labs to introduce Wikidata and its potentialities in Brazil
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From April 2017 to March 2018, I worked as a Wikipedian-in-Residence at RIDC Neuromat, in São Paulo, Brazil. During a part of this period, I had the opportunity to help in the organization and promotion of thematic edit-a-thons concentrated on mathematics and neuroscience. From October 2017 to March 2018, I could also take part in labs held at the same research center in which users were tutored on how to explore the potentialities of Wikidata, aiming to "share resources and capacities for the integration of Wikidata with other Wikimedia projects, specially Wikipedia".
Situated inside the University of São Paulo, the Research, Innovation and Dissemination Center for Neuromathematics was founded in 2013 and, since July 2014, it has put among its objectives the propagation of scientific knowledge by open educational resources, namely Wikimedia Foundation initiatives. Beside the synthesis of mathematical modelling and theoretical neuroscience, researchers at RIDC NeuroMat have uploaded images to Wikimedia Commons, added spoken articles about mathematics, created and improved pages about neuroscience, statistics and theory of probabilities and, since the last trimester of 2017, investigated Wikidata and its capabilities.
On October 5th, 2017, RIDC NeuroMat hosted its first Wikidata Lab. After a presentation by Éder Porto, editors were invited to practical activities in which they learned how to produce automatic infoboxes from Wikidata through the module WikidataIB to be used in Portuguese Wikipedia. 10 editors created more than 10 articles, edited around 130 pages, having made more than 339 edits.
Wikidata Lab II happened on November 16th, 2017. With an introduction by Mike Peel and his coordination, users were taught how to "prepare automatically lists on Portuguese Wikipedia from Wikidata", using Listeria. 9 articles were created and 139 pages were edited by 9 editors, corresponding to more than 440 edits.
The third edition of this sequence of Wikidata Labs was held on December 7th, 2017. Instructed by Célio Costa Filho, participants learned how to propose and use identifiers in the style of authority control, an action which may allow easier information comparison and data scraping in the future. 6 editors created 3 articles, edited more than 130 pages, having made around 280 edits.
RIDC NeuroMat hosted its fourth Wikidata Lab on February 22nd, 2018. Coordinated again by Éder Porto, editors discovered how to add large volumes of data to Wikidata with QuickStatements. 15 files were uploaded to Wikimedia Commons, 193 articles were created and 279 pages were edited by 15 editors.
The fifth edition of this Wikidata Labs series occurred on March 22nd, 2018. The finnish Wikimedian Ari Hayrinen introduced users by videoconference to GLAMpipe, a new tool which allows uploading files and metadata to Wikimedia Commons and Wikidata at the same time. 10 editors created more than 60 articles, edited more than 450 pages, having made around 1,260 edits.
All these Wikidata Labs were made possible with the help of the User Group Wikimedia in Brazil. On average, 10 editors were present at each event. These users were responsible for more than 1,750 edits on different Wikimedia projects. More quantitative information about this series may be found in the quoted Programs & Events Dashboard pages of RIDC NeuroMat. In spite of the long journey to be covered, these events show that the integration between Wikidata and its sister projects is not only desirable, but also possible with the effort and unity of those committed to the cause of free knowledge. Furthermore, this integration may contribute to fostering a new culture on how Wikimedians work cross-wikily, integrating easy-to-do connections among projects with the objective of providing high-quality information with efficiency.
