Conference Agenda

Introduction

GLAM institutions (Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums) have been exploring new ways to make their content available for decades. New initiatives and practices for the publication of FAIR (Wilkinson, 2016) data have emerged, including Collections as data (Padilla et al., 2023), the CARE principles (Carroll et al., 2020) and datasheets for Cultural Heritage datasets. In this context, free open source software solutions provided by the Wikimedia Movement, particularly the collaborative linked open data platform Wikidata and the Wikibase software, have emerged as popular tools in the Digital Humanities domain (see e.g. Candela, 2024). In this regard, the DARIAH-EU Working Group DHWiki, a space for discussions and dissemination of Wikidata and Wikibase, intends to build bridges between three sectors: DH researchers, GLAM institutions, and members of the Wikimedia movement. The results of the WG are expected to be relevant input for actors like DARIAH-EU, Europeana and the ECHOES Cultural Heritage Cloud.

Wikibase is a set of extensions for MediaWiki plus other complementary services, all licensed under free libre open source licenses. It includes a data triplestore, a graphical web editor, a SPARQL endpoint and query user interface and a set of web APIs. MediaWiki is the mature software running Wikipedias in 342 languages. Wikibase is the software running the Wikidata linked open data service and community. Wikidata manages 116,337,559 different items, licensed as CC0 opendata, and 6,900,125 registered users.

As part of the work performed by DHWiki, and as a collaborative effort, a white paper is being written, covering different aspects such as FAIR data on mediaWiki-based platforms (see dedicated page and Lindemann, 2025), the use of Wikibase in DH projects, and, from a DH perspective, the identification of requirements for further development of Wikibase and related tools. More generally, this work intends to encourage GLAM institutions and DH researchers to explore the tools and services provided by Wikimedia in their FAIR publication workflows.

Format

Representing the DHWiki WG, the speakers will provide an introduction to the concepts mentioned above. This will be followed by short presentations, which loosely correspond to the chapters to be included in the planned white paper. Finally, in the public Q&A part of the panel, questions like the following can be addressed: What are requirements from a DH perspective to use an approach based on the software provided by Wikimedia, and what are requirements for further development of the platforms and related tools? How to connect the DH and Wikimedia communities? The feedback from the audience will be used for refining the white paper. This is the set of short presentations:

• DHwiki, a new DARIAH-EU working group - Welcome, introduction, and brief presentation of the new working group, its members, and its activities.

  • David Lindemann, Gustavo Candela

• Wikibase feature description - Features of Wikibase, a cloud-based Linked Open Data editing and publishing solution.

  • David Lindemann, Ismael Olea

• FAIR data on Wiki-platforms - Wikimedia platforms (especially Wikisource, Wikimedia Commons, Wikidata, and Wikibase) as sustainable solutions for FAIR and 5-star open data publishing.

  • Maximilian Kristen, David Lindemann

• Who’s using Wikibase? Examples of existing Wikibase instances in the field of GLAM and DH - Existing examples for GLAM institutions and DH research groups using Wikibase and Wikidata for different purposes, particularly highlighting MiMoText (University of Trier), a research project in computational literary studies.

  • Christos Varvantakis, Christof Schöch

• Building a collaborative ecosystem for the Wikibase community - State of the art and perspective of outreach and discussion platforms and channels.

  • Alessandro Marchetti, Camillo Pellizzari

• Wikidata as a hub for identifiers - The importance of Wikidata as a huge collector of identifiers, through its 9000+ external-ID properties, and how databases can benefit from interactions with it.

  • Camillo Pellizzari, Gustavo Candela

• Wikibase, a solution for building transparent and collaborative data ecosystems - Wikibase for Accurate Mapping of the ‘State of the Art’ in Horizon Europe projects and in other EU-coordinated calls.

  • Alessandro Marchetti

• MediaWiki and Wikibase as platforms for a Do-It-Together (DIT) approach to research and education in Arts - Wikibase as an Arts-Based Educational Research framework focusing on themes like environmental sustainability, social inclusion, art history and art experimentation, will be discussed based on practical examples such as eViterbo, OpusTessellatum-PT, BioImages (https://coda-hd.letras.up.pt), and Very Small GLAM.

  • Vera Moitinho de Almeida, Tiago Assis, Alice Santiago Faria, Ismael Olea