Submissions/A data curation hub for students, journalists and writers: Country data reuse and coordination

From Wikimania 2014 • London, United Kingdom

After careful consideration, the Programme Committee has decided not to accept the below submission at this time. Thank you to the author(s) for participating in the Wikimania 2014 programme submission, we hope to still see you at Wikimania this August.

Submission no. 5002
Title of the submission

A data curation hub for students, journalists and writers: Country data reuse and coordination

Type of submission (discussion, hot seat, panel, presentation, tutorial, workshop)

presentation

Author of the submission
Hanteng Liao, Oxford Internet Institute
E-mail address
han-teng.liao@oii.ox.ac.uk
Username
en:User:hanteng/zh:User:hanteng
Country of origin
Taiwan
Affiliation, if any (organisation, company etc.)
Oxford Internet Institute
Personal homepage or blog
Abstract (at least 300 words to describe your proposal)
  • How can we make country comparison data (e.g. listed in Wikipedia articles, coded in Wikiedata, etc.) more accessible and useful for students, journalists and writers?
  • How can we define a intermediary role among (a) data source providers (e.g. UN, World Bank, Economist Intelligence group, individual researchers like en:DD index researchers), (b) editors/contributors of Wikimedia projects, and (c) new users including students, journalists, etc. in curating data that matches the mission statement of the Wikiemdia Foundation? '
  • Specifically, how can we empower people to utilize and enhance the country-based data infrastructure (e.g. country codes, flagicon, information box, wikidata) for building easily accessible tables, maps, figures, information boxes for students, journalists and writers?

The current Wikimedia infrastructure "falls short of providing easy ways for anyone to reuse and remix this knowledge," as admitted by the Wikimedia staff with a proposal to present a data and developer hub for Wikimania 2014, with the aim to make existing APIs more discoverable and useful. The proposal also mentioned that participants often do not even know the data existed.

As an experienced researcher and Wikipedia editor who curated openly available country-based datasets, with the latest contributions such as world region grouping maps and tables, e.g. map1,map2, list of regimes, list of dictatorships, Chinese Wikipedia version of country codes, List of regimes, List of dictatorships, the world's Chinese population distribution, Chinese political regimes' classification historical diagrams12, it remains a difficult task to process (open) datasets towards wiki format, and then make them also accessible for users such as casual Wikipedia readers (e.g. sorting, categorizing contries easily by clicking on the wiki table titles as in ).

I will present the difficulties, including the technical, editorial and data-management aspects for reusing and curating these datasets. In this presentation, I will argue that the benefits of curating such country-based dataset outweight the difficulties. I will also summarize some actionable techincal, policy and user-interface suggestions, using country-based dataset as a focal case, to improve users' experiences in reusing the data curation outcome that is currently available in the Wikimedia's projects.

This proposal aims to fill the similar gaps identified by the previously mentioned proposal, with a different focus on how users and casual readers can benefit from both mundane and creative reuse of Wikimedia data that is country-based. This proposal argues for a unique integrative position of Wikiemdia projects in the global reuse and coordination of Country data for better comparison, analysis, visualization, localization, etc.


Track

Open Data, Interface & Infrastructure, WikiCulture & Community (secondary track, will also be relevant.)

Length of session (if other than 30 minutes, specify how long)

30 minutes

Will you attend Wikimania if your submission is not accepted?

Yes

Slides or further information (optional)
Special requests


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  1. Sjgknight (talk) 08:46, 1 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]
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