Using Wikidata to capture and share information about paleontological collecting sites

4-5 October 2022, Virtual

This workshop will build on experience gained by participants in Part I of the series (Using Wikidata to capture and share information about people in paleontology) to explore the possibility of using Wikidata to curate community knowledge about paleontological collecting sites. Participants will begin by defining our information needs regarding paleontological collecting sites, including flagging aspects of the data that may be problematic to share publicly. We will then assess how these information needs could, or could not, fit into a Wikidata model. We will use a predetermined set of representative paleo collecting sites as test data for this workshop.

Using Wikidata to capture and share information about people in paleontology

29-31 March 2022, Virtual

This workshop will serve as a hands-on introduction to finding, editing, and using data in wikidata, using people associated with paleontology collections (e.g., collectors, researchers, collections staff) as subjects for this introduction. Wikidata offers a solution for capturing and sharing information about people that allows the paleontology community to capitalize on the distributed knowledge curated by individual collections. This workshop will explore how anyone working in paleo can add information to wikidata efficiently, as well as how to create links between wikidata and a collections management system (CMS). Workshop participants will co-create guidelines for disambiguating people and curating wikidata entries in the paleo context, including what types of information are ideal to capture (e.g., birth and death dates, research areas, collecting focus, links to publications, links to archival materials, etc.). These guidelines will build on existing work done by the bat research and collections community (see Leachman 2020), and will be disseminated after the workshop as a white paper.

Georeferencing for Paleo: Refreshing the approach to fossil localities

27-29 April 2020, Virtual

As the United States paleo collections community wraps up funding on several Thematic Collections Networks we recognize that a significant amount of digitization work remains to be done and that georeferencing is one of the next big roadblocks, both within the US and for our colleagues around the world. Across all collection types, there are major issues with the quality of georeference data currently available on biodiversity data aggregators such as iDigBio and GBIF. For paleo collections, there are additional issues related to applying existing georeferencing workflows in the paleontological context, as well as to sharing georeference data publicly. This workshop will take advantage of the momentum catalyzed by funding in the US paleontological collections community to address critical issues related to georeferencing workflows and georeferencing data quality.