User:John Cummings/Content partnerships

This page is written for institutions, companies, organisations and individuals who are interested in adding data to Wikidata.

About Wikimedia Commons

Wikidata aims to create a multilingual free knowledge base about the world that can be read and edited by humans and machines alike. It provides data in all the languages of the Wikimedia projects, and allows for the central access to data in a similar vein as Wikimedia Commons does for multimedia files, it is also used by many other websites including Google search results. The data on Wikidata is added by a community of volunteers both manually and by using software, much like other Wikimedia projects including Wikipedia. Wikidata has millions of items, each representing a human, a place, a painting, a concept, etc. Each item has statements (key-value pairs), each statement in turn consisting of a property such as "birth date", and the appropriate value for the item. Likewise, there can be statements for external IDs, such as a VIAF identifier. Wikidata is hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation, a nonprofit charitable organization dedicated to encouraging the growth, development and distribution of free, multilingual, educational content, and to providing the full content of these wiki-based projects to the public free of charge.

What content we host

Wikidata focuses on a basic level of useful information about the world and link to other resources for specialized data. Sources for data on Wikidata must be: Reliable Up to date Publicly available so they can be referenced. The best way to find out which parts of your data is suitable for Wikidata is to contact the Wikidata community.

Why add content to Wikimedia Commons

There are many reasons to add data to Wikidata including:

Help more people to see your information Data from Wikidata is used by many high traffic websites including Wikipedia and Google search. Wikipedia is one of the most used websites in the world receiving around 20 billion page views per month.

Improve open knowledge Wikidata hosts data that can be used on Wikimedia projects and beyond. By adding data to Wikidata you can make sure the data on your subject is well covered and up to date, improving Wikidata helps people in all languages.

Increase traffic to your website Anyone looking at Wikidata or other sites that use Wikidata including Wikipedia can see the reference for the data which is a link through to the source information.

Make your data more useful for yourself and others By adding data to Wikidata it becomes more useful Combine with other data Use Wikidata tools Visualisations

Wikimedia Commons and copyright

Individual facts and identifiers, such as numbers are not copyrightable. If you are an institution based in Europe, the whole of your ID list may be under database copyright, but we are not copying the entire list in bulk; rather, volunteers add most of them individually, one at a time. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikilegal/Database_Rights

How to add data to Wikidata

The process of adding Wikidata can be be technically challenging but the Wikidata community is very happy to discuss with you the best approach and offer assistance where needed, the basic process is:

1. Contact the Wikidata community describing what data you have and would like to include on Wikidata.
2. Decide with them what data would be suitable for inclusion.
3. Decide with them how best to add the data to Wikidata.

There are several ways to add data to Wikidata:

Manually data entry Anyone can add data to Wikidata by simply manually adding the data How to use Wikidata tools Where to ask for help

Online tools A set of online tools exist to import data sets into Wikidata, these include: Autolist 2: Mix n' Match: Quick Statements

Wikidata API What is it How to use it Asking for permission? Where to ask for help

Bots Bots are ...... What does your website need to allow a bot to harvest data How the bot process works

Reusing and combining Wikidata data

There are many tools to manipulate data on Wikidata, for a full list see the Wikidata external tools and the Tools Directory.

Reusing data You can use our data including translated names, birth/death dates and locations, free images, you name it.

Matching your data with other data sets Tools exist to augment or cross-check your data with data from other sources. One example is BEACON which can give you a list of your IDs matched against any other we have for the same items, e.g "BBC Your Paintings" artists against VIAF.

Visualisations Several tools exist to visualise Wikidata data including: Histropedia: uses data from Wikipedia and Wikidata to automatically generate interactive timelines with events linked to Wikipedia articles. Example: The Apollo missions Reasonator: a more advanced search and display of Wikidata items. Example: Johann Sebastian Bach GeneaWiki: a simple graph viewer showing genealogy information in WikiData. Example

Organisations whos data has been added data to Wikidata

Many organisation's data has been added to Wikidata, these include: Check in Mix n Match UNESCO US Federal organisations

Contacting the Wikidata community

There is a central noticeboard for contacting the Wikidata community called Project chat. Create a Wikimedia account (do not use the name of an organisation in the title). Make sure you are logged in Go to the Project chat page. Click the blue Start a new discussion button. Write a message and make sure to include a title in the title line. Sign the message using ~~~~ Click Show preview underneath your message to make sure your message has been written correctly, you will see that your username has appeared where the ~~~~ were added. Click Save page to post the message. Users will either reply to your message on the Project chat page or on your userpage which you can access by clicking Talk at the top of the screen next to your username. Please note pages become archived after a short while to make room for new messages, to access old messages go to the Archive index.

Other ways organisations can be involved with Wikimedia

There are a number of ways organisations can be involved with Wikimedia including: Making media content available Contributing to Wikipedia articles Hosting Wikimedia events Host a Wikimedian in Residence For more information contact your local Wikimedia chapter

Useful links

About Wikidata An introduction to Wikidata Community Portal A glossary of Wikidata terms Wikidata Tool Directory

To do

• Sort out translation tags
• Link to quickstatements and mix n' match pages after I've added https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/User:John_Cummings/Using_online_tools_to_import_data_into_Wikidata
• Copyediting
• Match introduction to different sections
• Make links for other pages
• Move page

something about finding a place for the data to go, cannot be the responsibility of the organisation interested in importing data, maybe something like start a community discussion to see what parts of

Potential links to include

• https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Community_portal
• Creating a Wikimedia account
• https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Project_chat
• API pages