International collaboration for Wikidata education

A group of education and Wikidata experts have joined forces to create teaching resources aimed at getting students familiar with ‘hidden figures’ in natural history collections. One such resource, created by two members of this group, teaches students about the open data repository Wikidata, and highlights how Wikidata can be an effective tool for recognising and amplifying scientific contributions made by underrepresented groups such as women and Indigenous peoples.

2023 Wikimedia Laureate and WANZ member Siobhan Leachman collaborated with Dr Makenzie Mabry from the Florida Museum of Natural History to produce these resources, thanks to funding from the National Science Foundation. Their work is part of wider efforts at many natural history collections around the world to decolonise their collections, drawing inspiration from research into decolonial approaches to interpreting natural history collections (Das and Lowe 2018).

The resource package, Integrating Wikidata with data sleuthing techniques for enhanced knowledge discovery of hidden figures (Leachman and Mabry, 2024) has been published on QUBES, a platform which enables the open sharing of STEM classroom activities and resources.

Siobhan Leachman and Makenzie Mabrey at XX International Botanical Congress, 24 July 2024 © Siobhan Leachman, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

Popularised by the book and subsequent movie of the same name, the term ‘hidden figures’ refers to individuals, tasks, or contributions in science that have been unrecognised and/or erased. 

While women, Indigenous peoples, and individuals from diverse backgrounds have always actively participated in the creation of natural history knowledge and collections, contributions by people from these groups are often underrepresented. By improving the coverage of contributions from marginalized participants in an online platform like Wikidata, we can improve their visibility and recognition, highlighting the value of contributions made by underrepresented groups to biodiversity knowledge.

“It is important to raise students’ awareness of the structural, historical and geographical biases that exist in biodiversity knowledge and data, and to teach students about tools and skills they can use to help overcome those biases,” explained author Siobhan Leachman.

“Wikidata is just one tool that can assist with this important work. Wikidata is particularly effective as it and its data is often used by internet search engines, large language models, and AI to inform their search results. By adding hidden figures to Wikidata, they become hidden no longer.”

These teaching materials are designed to introduce Wikidata to undergraduate and graduate students, detailing what Wikidata is, how it differs from Wikipedia, and how it can be used to highlight these hidden figures.

Students are guided through the steps of creating and becoming familiar with their Wikidata account, searching for data on a chosen natural history collector, creating a Wikidata item for that collector, and adding referenced statements and contributions to that item.

This Wikidata module builds on a previous publication by Leachman et al. (2023), An introduction to revealing hidden figures through data sleuthing, which provides an introduction to hidden figures within natural history collections and encourages students to consider whose stories are told and whose stories are left out.