File:Open Data Human Rights and Wikimedia.pdf

English: A presentation at WikiConference North America 2023

Abstract:

This presentation offers a case study of how a human rights and social science research project can contribute to the ecosystem of open knowledge within and outside of Wikipedia. I'm the lead researcher for Ultimate Consequences, a database and digital humanities archive documenting lethal political violence in Bolivia since the restoration of democracy in 1982. The project uses largely published sources, including human rights reports, media accounts, and academic scholarship, to document some 650 lives that have been ended by repression of protest, inter-ethnic conflict, violence over land disputes, and the privations of protest activities like cross-country marches and hunger strikes.

One components of the project intersects with a standard goal of Wikipedia writing and editing: providing succinct, NPOV, and fully cited narratives of major conflict events. We have pilot tested having student researchers edit these narratives into Wikipedia pages using the training offered by Wiki Education, making source documents publicly available via our research website, and using the Did-You-Know review as a way of improving the quality of our narratives. I'll reflect on, and invite questions regarding COI and OR standards in this process.

Separately, I'll talk about how attributed content on Wikipedia can be incorporated into an open data project, and ways that open data projects, once published, can contribute to the ecosystem of open knowledge of which Wikipedia and Wikidata are a part. In particular, I'll show how the data science programming language R can output both cited sentences and Wikidata Statements that draw directly from updatable datasets.