Kat Thornton, Kenny Seals-Nutt, Carl Wilson and Euan Cochrane
Wikidata, the knowledge base of structured data that anyone can edit, has roughly 16,000 active editors. The number of editors is growing steadily. How can we support hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of editors? One strategy is to create contribution pathways that reduce the barriers of entry for newcomers. We introduce Wikidata for Digital Preservation, a portal that allows users to curate structured data related to file formats, software, and configured software environments. The Wikidata for Digital Preservation Portal presents a subset of the 4,000 properties on Wikidata so that the user does not have to be familiar with the current inventory of properties. The interface guides users through finding items to edit, adding statements, adding qualifiers to statements and adding references. This portal will make it easier for people to contribute structured data related to this domain. Structured data about the technical metadata in the domain of computing is essential for digital preservation. This structured data can be used to power workflows in digital preservation systems. Due to the fact that this structured data is available as freely-reusable linked open data, digital preservation systems can query needed data from Wikidata on the fly.
