On September 27th, 2023 Will Kent, a Wikidata education specialist visited UR virtually to teach the class about the useful applications Wikidata. Kent started off with explaining the uses of Wikidata and went on to teach us about the search functions and its coding language SPARQL.
A clear takeaway from Kents lecture is that Wikidata is for the public by the public. Wikidata is a platform that the public contributes to and make information more open and available to everyone. This means that anyone can add, delete, and edit information as they please. While this is great for a community of honest teach geeks, some might abuse this privilege and make the information available on Wikidata not as reliable as intended.
Kent gave the whole class very an important introduction of Wikidata that will allow us to get to know Wikidata even better and from someone on the inside. This will simplify working with Wikidata throughout this class and understand the principles and values of Wikidata.
The lecture allowed me to understand the importance of freely available information and how important it is to sponsor and protect open source information platforms.
This experience ultimately connect to all of our assignment that are related to research using Wikidata as Kents lecture was able to give us a very good introduction to this platform from someone that has spent years in this field, specifically at Wikidata. This experience will continue to be useful throughout our work with Wikidata, having left a valuable imprint on our understanding of open source information. Besides, having an expert you can ask questions is always helpful.