DARIAH-EU Working Group DHwiki at DH2025: FAIR data in the Wikibase Ecosystem workshop and tutorial

A full-day workshop organised by the DARIAH-EU Working Group DHwiki and Wikimedia Portugal

DARIAH-EU WG DHwiki is delighted to announce a full-day workshop in the pre-conference programme of the DH2025 Digital Humanities Conference in Lisbon, Portugal. The workshop combines a tutorial and use-case presentations of the free and open Wikibase software, which is the software underlying Wikidata. In addition, participants will get individualised support in a “Wikibase Onboarding” hands-on session. The workshop will be conducted by members of the DARIAH-EU Working Group “DHwiki” and Wikimedia Portugal.

Date: Monday, July 14, 2025, Universidade NOVA, Avda. de Berna, Lisbon, Portugal
Registration: The workshop is part of DH2025 and registration is done when registering for the main conference.

An increasing number of GLAM and DH community members are contributing to or using Wikidata for different purposes (Zhao 2022). In addition, Wikibase has recently emerged as a software solution chosen for a wide range of organisations and projects of different kinds and scales (Rossenova et al. 2023, Shimizu et al. 2024). Wikibase use cases in the DH/GLAM context are manifold, and many projects rely on that software, some at a high level of maturity, some at an experimental stage. Self-hosting a Wikibase (Wikibase Suite) is not trivial, and possibly demands dedicated system admin staff, which may hinder smaller projects from using it. To address this, WMDE offers a free hosting solution for Wikibase (Wikibase Cloud), which frees the user from the burden of system-admin tasks; the service allows anyone to have up to six Wikibase instances. This infrastructure makes deploying Wikibase and related tools even more interesting for GLAM institutions of different sizes and for researchers. For this reason, the wikibase.cloud service will be presented in the mini-conference as a low-barrier option for using the Wikibase infrastructure yourself.

Among the existing examples for GLAM institutions and DH research groups using Wikibase and Wikidata for different purposes are the following: MiMoText (University of Trier, a research project in computational literary studies focusing on the French Enlightenment novel); The Rematriation Project (supports Inuit Arctic communities in digitizing and sharing their cultural, tribal, and scientific knowledge); The Digital Archive of Artists’ Publishing (interactive, user-driven, searchable database of artists’ books and publications); E-Viterbo (supports academic research in the fields of art and architectural history); Digital Scriptorium (builds an online national catalog for premodern manuscripts in US collections) Europeana EAGLE (develops a multilingual online collection of millions of digitized items from museums, libraries, and archives which deal with inscriptions from the Greek and Roman World); FactGrid (a large collaborative database for historians); Rhizome Artbase (a Wikibase of artwork metadata); LexBib (a domain knowledge graph for lexicography and dictionary research built upon a digital bibliography); database of the Department of Digital Humanities of ELTE (Hungary: also deploys Wikibase). Recently, lexicographical (dictionary content) and text corpus data have also been modeled not only on Wikidata, but also on custom Wikibase instances (see Wikibase-Lex). Wikibase World contains a directory of existing and historical Wikibase instances, while in our group’s own Wikibase Cloud instance, DHWiki, we document and curate existing research and scholarly publications about Wikibase and Wikidata. As for reports on conversions of legacy bibliographical catalogs to Wikibase LOD, we refer e.g. to recent experiments at OCLC (Bahnemann et al. 2021) and in the framework of the DARIAH WG Bibliodata (Lindemann et al. 2023).

The mini-conference will consist of two morning sessions with presentations targeting a broad public, and an afternoon session that will provide a deeper introduction to technical details and that primarily targets participants who are using or plan to use the Wikibase software themselves.

Wikidata / Wikibase tutorial

The tutorial section is designed for DH researchers, GLAM professionals, and Wikimedia contributors, whether experienced or new. Participants will develop an understanding of the functionalities of these tools, learn from real-world use cases, and explore practical workflows for managing and querying data. See the appendix for the planned structure of the session.

Wikibase use cases

In recent years, a wide range of institutions, organizations, groups and individuals from the Arts and Humanities have adopted Wikibase to host their databases. From datasets established for research purposes, to databases aiming at the wider public, the Wikibase ecosystem embraces numerous and diverse use cases. Five different Wikibase use cases will be presented (see appendix).

DARIAH DHwiki Working group presentation, Q&A and Wikibase Onboarding session

In this third section, all presenters of the preceding two sessions will be available. The section will be introduced by presenting the new DARIAH working group DHwiki, and guidelines for getting started with the Wikibase Cloud service (see below). After that, participants will receive support for setting up their own Wikibase instance, and guidance for starting to upload their own datasets. The remainder will consist of all presenters answering the participants’ questions, also regarding their presentations in the previous sessions, and giving hands-on support upon request. This will be supported remotely by the Wikibase Cloud team in Berlin.

Workshop programme