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Group discussion: what do GLAMs want from Wikidata and structured data on Commons, and how to act upon that?
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Description

From her experience working with various GLAMs (cultural institutes) donating or contributing data to Wikidata, User:Spinster outlines some requests and needs that these organizations have, that might at first sight be different from our own community's needs, but that would help to make our projects more useful to valuable external partners who can help us fulfill our mission.

(example project: Flemish museums contributing their collection data to Wikidata)

Discussion to follow may include:

  • What to do with these observations?
  • What else do we need to know/ask from external contributors?
  • Agenda-setting, prioritizing...

Let me first explain a trend that I notice while working with GLAM partners - and it's a bit scary to me. GLAMs themselves have spent a lot of time and effort on their own (individual and shared) platforms, image banks, open data repositories ... and have noticed that 1) maintaining these often does not work due to obsolescence of technology, lack of new funding, new insights and 2) it's better to use those platforms that their audiences actually use... such as Wikimedia platforms.
Especially in Linked Open Data strategies, I see the trend popping up that some groups of GLAMs are thinking about using Wikidata - and perhaps later also structured Wikimedia Commons - as basic linked open data infrastructures and repositories for themselves.

Additionally, typical requests from external data providers include:

  • Keeping Wikidata and external data sources linked and in sync
  • Ways, workflows, easy tools for external organizations to keep track of edits happening to 'their' data on Wikidata
  • Integrity of data from external providers (e.g. how to make sure that correct statements, sourced to an external data provider, are not vandalized or changed in an incorrect manner) (see also T138708 - Signed Statements)
  • Statistics of use and re-use of specific sets of data, both on Wikimedia projects and externally (see T138697)
  • And they would actually really love it if we'd embrace something like IIIF - so let them work from their own image repositories, with us embedding that.