“I have always found the whole area a minefield”: Wikidata, historical lives, and knowledge infrastructure

Baker, James and Mahal, Ammandeep K. (2024) “I have always found the whole area a minefield”: Wikidata, historical lives, and knowledge infrastructure. International Journal of Digital Humanities. (In Press)

Record type: Article

Abstract

The rise of Wikidata represents a quiet revolution in knowledge infrastructure. This paper enquires into this knowledge base as an infrastructure and considers the implications of its centrality within our contemporary knowledge ecosystem. Rather than read Wikidata at scale, we employ of a narrow frame through which to explore the ideologies Wikidata has adopted and reproduces. This frame is Beyond Notability, a knowledge base that seeks to document women's work in archaeology, history, and heritage between 1870 and 1950 through original archival research. Beyond Notability draws on and responds to the Wikidata data model, and this paper emerges from our experiences interacting with Wikidata to produce linked data biography. In foregrounding the tensions between historically specific phenomena and classificatory logics, our work stresses the value of using practice-based ontology development to investigate large-scale knowledge infrastructures at a time when the fabric of knowledge is at stake.

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