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44 Noneducational Wikimedia Project

The Wiki-Scientists Project

From late 2018 to October 2019, Maastricht University participated in the Wiki-Scientists project (translated from Dutch; Wiki-Wetenschappers, 2019) of the Dutch Foundation for Academic Heritage (SAE). The SAE is a network of Dutch universities that supports these universities’ heritage and cultural collections. With the Wiki Scientists project the SAE aimed to construct a publicly and centrally accessible overview of biographical information on Dutch professors and prominent scientists. Currently, four Dutch universities have an online Album Academicum, but a national overview did not yet exist. With the construction of this overview, the SAE wished to meet the need for a central access point to the distributed information sources held by the various Dutch university libraries and heritage institutions. In order to obtain this goal, it was proposed to collect all available biographical information of prominent Dutch scientists since 1575 and enter them into Wikidata. Furthermore, the intention was to construct this database in such a way that it could be optimally used and easily accessed by a general audience. In order to achieve the goals of the Wiki-Scientists project, two Wikimedians-in-residence were appointed. They made the biographical data structurally available on Wikidata.

At Maastricht University, data of all deceased professors has been processed, mapped, and linked to existing items in Wikidata, including first and last name, profession, date/place of birth, date/place of death, sex/gender, education and university, employer, position, and academic degree. All professors received a persistent identifier and all items have been assigned one or more citations. If possible, data is linked to the Virtual International Authority File (VIAF). The list is periodically updated by bots. Information and a current overview of Maastricht professors is available on Wikidata and the renderings of the Maastricht project data in Scholia (Scholia: Maastricht University, 2020). By participating in the Wiki-Scientists project, we have been able to contribute to a visible, usable, and sustainable heritage of prominent scientists in the Netherlands.