Wikisource logo
Wikidata logo
For Repo-Fringe 2016, myself and Histropedia’s Navino Evans will be co-presenting a showcase of two of Wikipedia’s sister projects: Wikisource, the free content library, and Wikidata, the structured data knowledge base. With both projects, it is not about what they hold in their repositories so much as what that knowledge means to the user able to access it; be it the experience of being able to commune with the past through Wikisource for those authentic ‘shiver-inducing’ moments of digital contact with library & archival materials or being able to manipulate & visualise structured data through Wikidata, actually querying & utilising information on Wikipedia, as never before in myriad ways. The possibilities for both projects are endless and highlight the importance of curating & safeguarding repositories of open knowledge such as these.
- Philip Pullman – Leave the libraries alone. You don’t understand their value.
- Library campaigners predict 1,000 closures by 2016 – The Guardian 12 July 2013
- Neil Gaiman: Why our future depends on libraries, reading and daydreaming – The Guardian 15 October 2013
- Digital Day of Ideas 2016: Lorna Hughes, “Content, Co-Curation and Innovation” (video)
- Open education on Wikipedia’s sister projects (Video – from 20 minute mark)
Hence our showcase event, as part of Repository Fringe 2016 on 2nd August at the John McIntyre Conference Centre in Edinburgh, will focus on this and provide practical demonstrations of how to engage with the past, present & future with these two projects.
Consequently, the English teacher part of me has opted for a title which attempts to sum this up:
Wikidata and Wikisource Showcase – 2nd August 2016
This is a nod to Simon Armitage’s poem, ‘It ain’t what you do, it’s what it does to you‘, a hymn of praise to the experiential.
It ain’t what you do, it’s what it does to you
I have not bummed across America
with only a dollar to spare, one pair
of busted Levi’s and a bowie knife.
I have lived with thieves in Manchester.
I have not padded through the Taj Mahal,
barefoot, listening to the space between
each footfall picking up and putting down
its print against the marble floor. But I
skimmed flat stones across Black Moss on a day
so still I could hear each set of ripples
as they crossed. I felt each stone’s inertia
spend itself against the water; then sink.
I have not toyed with a parachute cord
while perched on the lip of a light-aircraft;
but I held the wobbly head of a boy
at the day centre, and stroked his fat hands.
And I guess that the tightness in the throat
and the tiny cascading sensation
somewhere inside us are both part of that
sense of something else. That feeling, I mean.
The famous aviation poem written in 1941 by 19-year-old Pilot Officer John Gillespie Magee Jr, three months before he was killed.
Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of earth,
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I’ve climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
Of sun-split clouds, –and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of –Wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov’ring there
I’ve chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air…
Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue
I’ve topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace
Where never lark or even eagle flew —
And, while with silent lifting mind I’ve trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.
