Learn Wikidata: A New Interactive Course For Information Professionals

From Wikimedia’s “Diff” Blog:

The Learn Wikidata course aspires to teach librarians, library staff members, and other information professionals how to edit bibliographic information on Wikidata. While library professionals are experts in bibliographic data, the data model and editing environment of Wikidata may feel unfamiliar. In this peer-led course, library professionals at Vanderbilt University provide a guided tour of Wikidata, starting with basics like creating accounts and adding items and then introducing advanced tools to make editing more efficient.

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The course is available in three different languages: Chinese, English, and Spanish. A French version of the course is coming soon. These editions are not simply translations but full contextualizations of the content. That is, we tried to select culturally-relevant articles and books for the different language editions. The decision to contextualize the content required us to produce four videos for each of the twenty topics we covered. You can do the math! But we feel the final result was well worth the effort. If other Wikidata users would like to produce a different edition of the course for another language, we would be happy to provide advice and support. If you want to take a closer look at our creative process, we have made our project artifacts available at our Github repository.

The project participants were Clifford Anderson, María Pía Arrate, Steve Baskauf, Marymae Jansson, Benjamin Klempay, Charlotte Lew, Greg Weldy, and Andrew Wesolek. Tania Carter and Susan Grider provided administrative support. We are grateful to Liam Wyatt, Senior Program Manager, Wikimedia Foundation, for his guidance and encouragement throughout the project. Finally, many thanks to the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation for supporting these WikiCite grants.

Learn More, Read the Complete Blog Post

Direct to Learn Wikidata

See Also: Direct to Resasonator (A Favorite Wikidata Tool)

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