Congratulations to Mariam Farda-Sarbas! Her exposé with the title "Bots and Their Impact on Knowledge Diversity in Wikidata" was accepted in the Doctoral Consortium at OpenSym 2019.

The doctoral consortium takes place on Monday, 19 August 2019 at University of Skövde.

Abstract

Wikidata is one of the most edited knowledge bases which was launched in 2012. The contributing community, as shown by research, consists of humans and bots, with bots being the most active editors of Wikidata. Bots can edit larger amounts of data and at a higher pace than humans, thus, their edits can have considerable impact on data quality in Wikidata. Data quality as ‘fitness for use’ in the Wikidata context is the data that can be accessed by anyone anywhere in the world, and is partially implemented by allowing multiple values for an entity in the form of aliases, multilingual labels, multiple statements, claims and references (sources). This schema design for coexistence of diverse or contradictory statements is called plurality which is a design principle of Wikidata, and refers to the concept of knowledge diversity. Knowledge diversity supports Wikidata's overarching goal of becoming a global knowledge base through storage of knowledge without a judgment of good or bad. This research aims to study how data quality in Wikidata can be improved by improving knowledge diversity using bots.