Talk:2019/Grants/Source Scour

Additional Info Requested

Hi Michael, hope all is well. We were wondering if you have any help from the WikiData community in terms of implementing your project, and also wanted to know if the things that journalists input would have anyway of making their way back to WikiData? Thanks much! --Connie (talk) 14:43, 9 April 2020 (UTC)

Response

We are staying healthy, and I hope you are as well! We had talked through a variation of this idea last year with both some local WikiData contributors at our Code for Boston volunteer nights as well as at the WikiConference North America. We've also been working with a technology company that has contributed to and built integrations with WikiBase, and their guidance has been really helpful in thinking through the technical aspects. We're planning to continue taking folks up on those offers to help and to think through how this project can strengthen the WikiData commons. Having our database of state, local, and federal agencies linked to their WikiData ideas has been a long-term goal and we've had a few folks volunteer to help ensure a solid implementation.

As to the second question, we definitely would like to contribute those datasets that meet notability requirements and we think there's lots of opportunities there, particularly as we gather COVID-19 related data. In the long term, we think that the platform developed as part of this project will be able to contribute more generally notable, well vetted resources, and during the project period we hope to develop an informal process for determining when a dataset is complete and notable enough for submissions to the WikiData platform.

We've also been evaluating linking some of our researched data sets, such as metadata on 15,000 US government agencies, with their WikiData IDs, allowing us to both enrich our own database as well as contribute to data gaps on WikiData in an ongoing basis. Given the reliance of other newsrooms on us, we believe this will spur more newsroom integrations with WikiData in the future. -- Morisy (talk) 02:05, 10 April 2020 (UTC)