Welcome to the ReadMe. My name is John, I'm the Communications Coordinator for Wikimedia UK, the charity responsible for promoting Wikipedia and supporting the Wikimedia community in the UK.
Problem: There is an emerging understanding in government, cultural and educational institutions that data is important, valuable, and should be harnessed in order to improve society. But how can we teach people what data is?
One of Wikipedia's sister projects, Wikidata is an Open data repository of almost 50 million data items that are machine readable and can be queried. It's a perfect tool to teach people how to work with data, and can be used to link existing data sets that are unconnected. Wikidata is, for example, the most complete data set of sites of cultural heritage across the world.
So the question is: how can I build a communications strategy that informs people about the value of Wikidata, and how do we convince institutions to work with us to train students, researchers and other information professionals to use Wikidata, and partner with Wikimedia UK in doing so?
What should this strategy include? I need your help in identifying who we should be targeting: university courses? Coding clubs? Wikimedia UK generally does training to help people understand how to edit Wikipedia, so we also need to identify how many people in the UK could run Wikidata training workshops.
Wikidata is an Open Data repository with millions of items that can be searched using SPARQL. SPARQL is similar to SQL, which is used by many people who work with large databases. So one group of people we may want to target is people who already know SQL.
If we could train people to understand and use SPARQL, we can bring more developers and technically minded people into the Wikimedia community in the UK, making out community more sustainable, and helping to organise more projects within the Wikidata community.
We also want to reach people who may have datasets which they have never thought about making Open Source. Many universities may have these - but how do we show the people in charge of them the benefit of making their data Open so it can be usef productively?
Wikidata could be as or more important eventually than Wikipedia, but it's probably not going to appeal to as big an audience. We imagine that in the future lots of university courses could include Wikidata elements in training their students how to manipulate data, how to do data journalism, how to visualise data and the value of working openly and collaboratively to find out new things about our world.
Please see the Readme and Contributor guidelines.
- Contributor guidelines - How to contribute
- Roadmap - Look at the project roadmap
- WMUK - Check out the Wikimedia UK site
Give the example