Page:Wikipedia and Academic Libraries.djvu/274

Rh Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to João Alexandre Peschanski, Av. Paulista, 900, Bela Vista, São Paulo, SP, 01310–100 Brazil. Email: japeschanski@casperlibero.edu.br

Keywords

Wikidata, Scholarly literature, Bibliographic references.

Introduction

Wikimedia-supported knowledge projects have seen robust acceptance in the Global South, notably in Brazil. Wikimedia projects are attractive in Global South communities for decentering the use of the English language and the low cost of use and access. In contrast, institutional repository and data platforms are prohibitively expensive, either in cost or maintenance, for Global South galleries, libraries, archives, and museums (GLAMs). These tools additionally require technology out of the reach of Global South institutions. Resources for “community-owned infrastructure, and robust metadata to facilitate open scholarship practices” (ARL Task Force on Wikimedia and Linked Open Data, 2019) have grown in both size and depth in Brazil and other Global South communities. In contrast, the high cost of computer hardware, so ware, and Internet connectivity in Global South GLAMs, as well as a lack of technology specialists, is a constraint unlikely to change at present or in the near future. Internet connectivity in Brazil is limited to 74 percent in museums and 66 percent in libraries (Centro Regional de Estudos para o Desenvolvimento da Sociedade da Informação, 2018). Some of these infrastructure and technological obstacles are addressed by demonstrating the use of Wikidata to index items of scholarly articles in the Brazilian context.

Sources on Wikimedia Projects

Referencing reliable sources is an essential component of a Wikipedia article (Orlowitz, 2018), yet the quality of referencing has varied across Wikipedia instances in different languages (Lewoniewski et al., 2020). Some progress has been made in citation inclusion, but in general the