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2 years ago Ping @CliffordAnderson @awesolek2
At the 2022-06-13 ARLIS/NA Wikidata call, Lozana Rossenova talked about difficult issues of modeling in Wikidata. At various points she mentioned ongoing projects to make using Wikidata easier for cultural heritage projects.
It's probably already pretty widely known that Wikimedia Deutchland has a cloud implementation of Wikibase set up that's pretty easy to use. It apparently already has tools built into it to port over existing properties from Wikidata, although it doesn't have any items. Her group is working on creating a Dockerized version of Wikibase that would come already set up with useful data for cultural heritage projects, such as classes and properties from CDOC-CRM already entered as items.
She also works on the OpenRefine team and they are developing tools to make it easier to upload data to Wikibase. It's the subject of an upcoming workshop on June 20-24. She said they are always on the lookout for testers.
Also she recommended Sandra Fauconnier (Wikimedia Commons) as an important potential contact. She's one of the people behind Structured Data on Commons and I think she's also working on the OpenRefine project.
I created this issue to capture some useful information about using Wikibase for cultural heritage projects.