(speaking in Maori)
As has been explained, I'm Siobhan Leachman.
I'm a Wikimedian from New Zealand.
I contribute to Wikidata,
as well as English Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Commons.
I'd like to thank the Wikimedia Foundation,
Wikimedia Deutschland,
and, in particular,
the organizing committee of the WikidataCon
for enabling me to attend this conference and present today.
Now, in this presentation,
I want to tell you about the vital role
I think Wikidata and Wikidata editors can play in surfacing notable women.
I want to take you through my workflows,
ensuring that these underacknowledged women and their work
can be added to Wikidata.
I want to show how the curation of data on these women
can assist with the creation of citable secondary sources.
This, in turn, can encourage and enable
the creation of Wikipedia articles about these women
in a variety of languages.
Now, I'm sure you're aware
that Wikipedia editors are working hard to write more articles on women.
Examples of projects focusing on this type of work
are the Women in Red project or the WikiProject Women Scientists.
But one of the main hurdles I've experienced
when attempting to write about women in Wikipedia
is the notability criteria.
When writing articles on women,
I've found this criteria can be a challenge to achieve.
I've discovered women are less likely to be written about
in citable secondary sources,
and this has particularly been brought home to me
when I've attempted to write articles about women and the scientists pre-1950.
However, just like in our Wiki projects,
there are plenty of researchers and creators of secondary sources
out in the wider world attempting to change this.
They just need to be pointed in the direction of these women,
and I believe Wikidata can be their arrow.
Now, yes, like Wikipedia, Wikidata has a notability criteria
that must be met.
But this criteria is a much lower bar.
I'm advocating using Wikidata to get a foot in the Wiki door
for unrepresented groups.
By adding these women to Wikidata,
editors can then make it easier
for the data about them to be collated, curated, and linked.
In doing so, it would make it easier for researchers and writers,
the generators of these vital secondary sources,
to find these women
and then to use the data to guide their research.
Once coverage reaches the Wikipedia notability threshold,
Wikipedia editors can then create articles on these underrepresented people.
Now, I want to show you how I put this into practice,
to take you through how I started on this data journey,
and to give you examples of the collaborations
I and others like me have managed to forge,
enabling this type of work to be done.
Now, I tend to focus on data about women in the field of natural history--
these women scientific illustrators, collectors of specimens
as well as women scientists, such as botanists and zoologists.
I became interested in these women
when I started volunteering for the Smithsonian Transcription Center.
I helped transcribe natural history specimens
or scientific handwritten field notebooks,
and, in doing so, I frequently came across women,
many of whom had contributed specimens to the Smithsonian
or had undertaken scientific research.
At the same time, I was volunteering for the Biodiversity Heritage Library,
or BHL.
Now, BHL is the world's largest open-access digital library
of biodiversity literature and archives.
Much of the biodiversity literature they host is historic
and therefore in the public domain.
They've got an extensive collection of scientific illustrations in Flickr.
So I would tag those images with not just taxonomic names
but as well as illustrated tags.
That metadata is in turn ingested and stored into BHL.
The hope is to use those tags to become searchable
at some point in the future on BHL's website.
But as an added bonus, many of these tags have been incorporated into Wikicommons
as a result of those Flickr files being bulk uploaded
by other Wikicommons editors.
It was while transcribing with the Smithsonian
I met and started collaborating with another volunteer,
Michelle Marshall.
Both of us were avid taggers
of BHL images,
and while doing this work,
both Michelle and I were enthusiastically kept encouraged
by Grace Constantino, the BHL Outreach and Communications Manager.
And while tagging, we would again come across women,
so many women, amazing women,
about whom there appeared little known or written.
Some of these women would be illustrating multiple articles,
books, and scientific publications.
Others would be writing the books or articles,
amassing collections of specimens, or having species named after them.
Both Michelle and I were really keen on making known more about these women,
but there was very little about them on the internet.
Every once in a while,
there would be a women who had significant coverage,
enough so there was a Wikipedia article created about them,
but this was an exception rather than the rule.
This lack of coverage was frustrating to both of us,
and, as a result, I became keen on learning how to edit Wikipedia.
Both the folk in the Smithsonian and BHL were extremely encouraging.
They too were keen on addressing this issue
of underrepresented women
and wanted to highlight notable women in their collections
via various WikiProjects.
So both Michelle and I started researching,
me with the aim of writing Wikipedia articles,
her with the aim of writing blog posts and enriching the BHL Instagram account.
Now, on the rare occasion we managed to find enough sources and references
to get these women over the English Wikipedia notability criteria,
I'd actually write an article.
But as I've explained, this tended to be the exception rather than the rule.
Historically, much of these women's illustration work
was not regarded at the time of their creation
as being worthy of comment.
At most, they received a passing remark in the reviews of the publication
or perhaps an acknowledgment by the author of the work.
This lack results in them being overlooked by library catalogs,
and they and their contributions were simply not recorded.
They created scientific illustrations
so didn't tend to exhibit in art galleries.
The art was created to enhance the scientific publication
and wasn't treated as a stand-alone work,
worthy of critique and public display.
It was, therefore, very rare to find enough sources
to get these women artists over the notability hurdle.
But we tried.
Working together, Michelle and I began researching these women
and gathering our information into a Google spreadsheet,
Often, we'd track down enough data to work out who they were,
the works they contributed to, and who they worked for.
BHL recently enabled a full text search,
which has significantly improved our ability to find information on them.
We'd search for and, if we were lucky, find external identifiers,
such as the BHL creator ID
or the Stuttgart Scientific Illustrators Database ID,
or if we were really lucky, a VIAF ID.
However, there was no guarantee
an external database identifier would exist.
So we'd tag their plates in Flickr,
collate our research on these women in our spreadsheets,
and then wait for more books and articles
and institution blogs and research to be generated.
For me, getting them into Wikipedia was the gold standard,
but I could stretch the notability criteria only so far.
My first Wikipedia article on a woman botanist
was nominated for deletion,
and ever since that experience, I've been extremely careful
about ensuring I did everything possible to meet the notability criteria.
But I was actively looking for ways
to make our work more impactful and effective.
Now, at this point, I know what you're thinking,
what about Wikidata?
And I completely agree.
As soon as I discovered Wikidata, I took the leap and started editing.
But, again, unfortunately,
I came up against the Wikidata notability criteria.
Early on, I had an item deleted
due to my failure to meet even the Wikidata notability criteria.
I was having to meet even that low bar.
But this was all part of my learning by mistakes,
and I soon adapted my workflow to allow for this.
I realized I could ensure these women met the Wikidata notability criteria
by creating at least one valid WikiCite link.
So my workflow started
with me creating a Wikicommons category page for these women
and then manually adding this category to her illustrations,
the illustrations that had been previously uploaded
from the BHL Flickr feed
into Wikicommons by other editors.
Once the category page was created,
I would then create a Wikidata item for that woman,
including that category in the item.
I'd then begin to collate
all the information and research we'd found out
about that particular woman.
I would autogenerate a creator page in Wikicommons
via that Wikidata item.
I'd improve the structured data of the scientific art in Wikicommons
by adding the creator markup to each of her images.
And I believe this assists with the structured data on Commons
as it links the Wikidata item to the artist
and to the work in Commons.
I'd like to emphasize this was a manual process.
I wasn't working from established dataset.
There is no established dataset for these women that I can find.
I would also use the reference section of the Wikidata statements,
not just to reference the statements themselves,
but also with an eye to help collate
all the links we discovered during our research.
I wanted to leave a research trail,
making it easier for me and others like me
to find these links
and then write either secondary sources
or, if appropriate, a Wikipedia article on these women.
Obviously, if external identifiers existed,
I wanted to include them.
Again, to my disappointment,
despite the prestige of the works they were illustrating,
many of these women were not listed in external databases.
I would always check VIAF,
the Virtual International Authority File database.
But, from my personal experience,
there appears to be a bias against illustrators,
no matter what their gender.
I admit this is anecdotal
because I'm unable to find any research to support this.
But VIAF would often list the author of the [inaudible] publication,
but not the illustrator.
And this would even be the case
even if the illustrations made up a large proportion of the work,
or the woman was thanked profusely on the dedication page.
I would also check the Stuttgart Scientific Illustrators database.
This is one of the most comprehensive databases
for scientific artists.
Sometimes the woman would be in there,
but sometimes not.
Although a fabulous starting point,
this database wasn't as comprehensive as I needed.
But the wonderful thing about it was how responsive its creator,
the History Department of the University of Stuttgart,
was to emails.
Both Michelle and I would write to them,
including our research on particular women illustrators,
asking for these women to be included.
Again, there is a threshold to this.
I certainly wouldn't write to them
unless I had reasonable supporting evidence
to justify their inclusion.
But the information they needed to generate an external identifier
was definitely less than what was needed to do a Wikipedia article.
Folk in charge of this database were very grateful for our input,
and once our research was confirmed by them,
they would add these women to their database
and then would generate an external identifier.
They were also able to access resources that neither Michelle nor I had access to.
Often, more data was added on these women in the DSI database
as a result of their further research.
A Wikidata property had already been created for this database,
and so once awarded,
it was an identifier I could then add to the woman's Wikidata item.
Now, Michelle and I also contacted the BHL about these women.
This is where our collaborative relationship with Grace
came to the fore.
Grace would encourage us to submit a request
that the woman's name be added to the BHL catalog record.
This is a more convoluted process than it might appear.
BHL metadata is sourced from numerous contributing institutions.
Since it was a cataloging change,
the BHL protocol required that the change be submitted as a change request
to the BHL cataloging group for review and final approval.
So, again, to obtain the change to the catalog
and the subsequent external identifier,
it wasn't an easy rubber stamp process.
We had to back up our request with sources and proof
in order for the catalog to be changed.
However, because we were doing this relatively frequently,
the catalog group became used to our requests
and were very appreciative of our efforts.
If the necessary criteria was satisfied,
the institutions were prepared to edit their metadata,
and in doing so, create another external identifier,
the BHL creator ID.
At around the same time we were undertaking this work,
BHL, in its intern program,
was collaborating with other Wikidata editors.
The BHL resident [Katie Nika] was working with Andy [Mebert]
trialing adding BHL creator IDs to Wikidata.
The original test case was 1,000 names into the Mix-n-Match tool,
But, subsequently,
the whole created dataset was uploaded into Mix-n-Match,
allowing the matching of BHL dataset to Wikidata items.
This dataset is huge and continues to be worked on by editors today.
Due to the lack of resources,
unfortunately, BHL can't continue Katie's work in Wikidata,
but there are very encouraging of folk reusing their data
and their collections and WikiProjects.
Now, editors have also approved several BHL Wikidata properties,
not just for the creator ID,
but also the bibliographic ID, page ID, and item ID.
And, as a result, it's now possible to link these women illustrators
to their works via Wikidata.
Obtaining a creator ID and therefore a Wikidata item
can ensure a cascade of linked open data on them
that can raise the visibility of these women to researchers.
Slowly, I began to feel we were making real difference
in surfacing these women.
At least now when folk googled them
the Wikidata item would appear
and images they had created would show up in the image feed.
Our research, tags, blogs, Wikidata items, and external identifiers
brought about by our requests
were all coming together,
making these women much more easier to discover.
Grace had already been using our tagging work
in the BHL social media feeds
to highlight the illustrations in the collections.
Member institution librarians were writing blogs on these women
and raising their visibility to a variety of audiences.
These edited, well researched and referenced blogs
were a definite step in the ladder
towards obtaining citable sources for Wikipedia articles.
But our work really came to the fore
when BHL held their "Her Natural History:
A Celebration of Women in Natural History" campaign.
This was a multi-institutional, multi-platform campaign
to raise awareness
and to celebrate the contributions of women to natural history.
This campaign resulted in numerous outcomes,
many of which had a direct impact
on the richness of the metadata available on these women.
So the BHL cataloging group
added more female contributors to the BHL catalog,
generating more external identifiers.
More images by the women were added to the Flickr feed,
and these were either in the public domain or openly licensed
so were able to be uploaded into Wikicommons.
Numerous blog posts were written
by the employees of the member institutions.
Some of these blogs used the research Michelle and I had undertaken
as a starting point,
picking it up and running with it.
These blogs often resulted
in the discovery of new resources and sources of information
that assisted in pushing some of the women
over the notability threshold for a Wikipedia article.
During the campaign, there were also three Wikimedia workshops:
the Wikimedia District of Columbia
ran a workshop concentrating on generating and improving
Wikipedia articles on these women;
two additional workshops were organized by Esther Jackson
and jointly hosted by the New York Botanical Garden
and the Wikimedia New York City.
The first workshop focused on editing tags to the BHL Flickr feed
and the second workshop focused on editing Wikidata and Wikicommons.
These events made use of research [inaudible]
that Michelle and I had undertaken in the preceding years.
Worklists were generated
by both the spreadsheets Michelle and I had created,
as well as from Wikidata items that I, along with other editors,
had helped create.
And this campaign, I think, shows how effective Wikidata can be
in assisting with the interlinking of knowledge.
The Wikidata items became a leaping-off point,
providing a framework enabling research
to be collated and writing to commence.
Now, this is just one example of a collaboration
that can improve linked open data on these women.
Once these women have a presence on Wikidata,
the item itself can be put to use.
An example of this
is women natural history specimen collectors.
Many underacknowledged women contributed to scientific knowledge,
collecting specimens,
and these are held in museums and herbaria.
As more and more of these collections are digitized,
more of the collectors are coming out of the woodwork.
There are now sites being developed
to assist scientists in getting the recognition they deserve
from their fieldwork and collecting.
The site I've recently been utilizing is Bloodhound Tracker.
It uses the ORCID ID or the Wikidata item
to link the collector to their collected specimen
via the Global Biodiversity Information Facility, or GBIF.
Collection information is a rich vein of data on early woman scientists,
particularly as at that time, they'd been unable to publish works
or join scientific societies
due to the social norms of the day.
Wikidata can be used to collect information on these women,
linking the information held on them from archives, libraries, and museums,
or to the scientific literature, based on the specimens they've collected,
or the species that have been named after them.
Once a Wikidata item is created
and sufficient metadata has been added to it,
the Bloodhound Tracker site
will then automatically ingest details about those women into its site.
Contributors can help those women claim their collections,
enriching not just the linked open data,
but ensuring these women get the credit for their vital work.
But, again, Wikidata notability criteria can be a challenge.
If the women collected significantly
but didn't contribute
either to the published record or as an illustrator,
it can be difficult to hurdle the notability criteria for Wikidata.
However, as more and more libraries, archives, and museums,
and genealogical databases are gaining Wikidata external identifiers,
it's becoming easier for these women
to become notable for the purposes of Wikidata
and then use Wikidata to link them to their works.
I believe similar workflows to what I've outlined
can be used for other underrepresented groups.
By actively working to achieve the notability criteria for Wikidata,
and then expanding the Wikidata items
to highlight the contributions of underrepresented people,
it's possible to improve their visibility.
This, in turn, assists with the generation of secondary sources
and creates a virtual cycle
of information creation, sharing, and linking.
By being proactive and collaborative,
it's possible to work towards eliminating underrepresentation.
Thank you.
(applause)
(women) Have you found any publication
in which all of the illustrations actually need their own item?
I think there will be; there definitely is.
But if I went down that rabbit hole...
I've got to stop somewhere,
and I'm just trying to concentrate on the women.
But, yes, there are classics of biodiversity literature
that not only should have an item for the book itself
but also for each illustration.
I mean, Elizabeth Gould immediately springs to mind.
Every piece of art that she ever did--
(woman) I would just say Maria Sibylla...
Yep, she's a classic too.
(man) James [Heald]. While you've been working on this,
do you think that the way the notability criteria
have been being applied has changed?
- Is there are drift in a good direction? - Yes, I do think it has.
Other than that first item being...
I admit it was partially my mistake.
I did the item, and I didn't have an external identifiers,
and it seemed, because of the lack of the information I provided,
I am not surprised it got deleted.
Now I'm more experienced.
But, saying that, I'm pretty sure I could put the same thing in nowadays
and it wouldn't get deleted.
I actually do think it has improved.
(James [Heald]) Different question.
I've seen on your Twitter sometimes,
you've found women's work credited to their husbands.
- Oh God, yes! - Would you say a bit more about that?
Okay, there's a whole problem...
Specifically, what gets me
having to be peeling myself off the ceiling with rage
is when the women botanists go out and collect
and they're known under their marriage name,
and then they put their specimens into the herbaria
and the herbaria have a database,
they transcribe the names,
but they don't have a space in their database
for the vital, important missus.
And so what happens is that always,
if it's pre-1950
and the guy's known for being prolific,
check his wife,
because most of the time either she's typing
and helping him produce the scientific papers
or she's out there collecting with him.
Yes, that's a definite problem that I have been raising
with a lot of the herbaria.
They just keep saying,
"Our database doesn't have a place for the missus,"
and I say, "Find a place because it's important."
Yeah.
(man 2) What other domains will you copy this to?
Because you're now doing it for a very specific subject.
What comes to mind?
It's a good question.
I think anything where people get disappeared,
where they're not credited for their work,
it tends to be where they get lost.
So something historic and the data just isn't linked.
For me, women are the classic example.
But I also think if there's, for example--
one that does spring to mind is artists in New Zealand,
Maori artists, for example, who get acknowledged to oral history,
but there are no written works,
and so the scholarship could possibly be a problem later on down the track.
I think that was a group that's ripe for using this type of work,
to try and get identifiers for them,
to make them more notable, to get them into Wikidata,
so that then researchers are pointed towards them
and can start doing the research needed to rediscover them.
(woman 2) Okay, so I do a lot with women artists,
and what I've found, apart from the married name thing,
is they also tend to stay local,
so they don't move and cross borders.
It turns out notability is very highly correlated
with the number of borders you cross in your lifetime.
Right, yeah.
To tell you the truth, I actually find that a benefit.
It's much easier to disambiguate someone if they don't shift.
If they've been in one place,
you can then find the database,
like the births or deaths or marriages database,
and you can work out on the basis of their address
or you can find them a lot easier if they don't shift.
It's when they shift, and they change from maiden name to married name
that it can get really difficult.
(woman 2) Yeah.
(woman 3) Just adding to the question
that was asked earlier in what field you could use this.
If it's a case where people are disappearing or are not visible,
meaning that for women, in my opinion,
that would mean like everywhere.
Yeah.
(woman 3) One of the things I work on is Delftware pottery workshops,
and that was an official job in the 17th century.
And when the potter died, there needed to be a new potter
that was inscribed in the official guild book,
- unless his wife could take over. - Ah!
(woman 3) And then she could take over without that diploma,
or whatever you want to call it,
sometimes for years.
And it would be attributed to her husband?
(woman 3) Yes, because the pottery is always attributed to the owner.
And they're like one line in the official encyclopedias...
This doesn't surprise me.
...where the women are like taking care of the business for 10 years
[and say for a job] of their husband for two years,
but all the pottery items would be marked--
I think this is a really good example of how Wikidata can actually be used
to surface these women
and have something to hang the scholarship off,
so that then, eventually,
the more people who don't struggle to try and find the base information
can then start the research, and the in-depth research
that's required to surface these women.
Wikidata, I think, is the easy way to have a framework,
a skeleton to hang the bare data that you've got on
to enable that research to happen.
Yeah.
(man 3) I'm sorry we are out of time.
We have the lunch break now, so thank you.
Well, come talk to me if anyone else has any questions.
(applause)