Page:Wikipedia and Academic Libraries.djvu/275

262 addition of references to a Wikipedia article remains an excessively technical endeavor. An instance of a reference is limited to its article and cannot be shared among articles; more importantly, it is difficult to move a reference between different-language Wikipedias, even with the support of translation tools.

Wikidata is a free, collaborative knowledge base (Vrandečić & Krötzsch, 2014), and it can be used to overcome existing inefficiencies in the Wikipedia referencing model. The creation of items for scholarly articles and other periodical literature for a Wikimedia project is a useful contribution in its own right. A single, simple recent improvement to the article citation creation process in Wikipedia is the ability to create a reference based on a Wikidata identifier (QID), which can then be reused independently across different-language Wikipedias. A more advanced utility, not yet fully developed, would be a system in which article citations generated from Wikidata items are automatically updated or improved when the corresponding Wikidata item is enhanced.



Figure 1 Number of items for scholarly articles in Wikidata by country of publication. Retrieved on September 26, 2020. Data available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4051056.

Figure 1 highlights the imbalance of items for scholarly articles from North America and Europe in Wikidata in comparison to those elsewhere. is chapter specifically aims to motivate editors from the Global