Wikidata can play a vital role in surfacing notable women and can assist with closing the gender gap in various language Wikipedias. Using the example of under acknowledged women in the field of natural history, this presentation will show how Wikidata editors can collate data enabling researchers to more easily locate, investigate and publish on underrepresented women. The interlinking of elements in the Wikimedia Commons Structured Data project can assist editors in establishing sufficient notability for Wikidata items for these women. This in turn can assist Wikipedians to overcome the notability criteria for Wikipedia articles. This presentation will outline the practical steps needed to ensure the creation or improvement of external identifiers for these women through collaboration with other organisations such as the Biodiversity Heritage Library and the Stuttgart Database of Scientific illustrators. This wikiwork can then feed into external organisation outreach campaigns creating a virtuous cycle of data creation, sharing and linking.


Siobhan is a citizen scientist and linked open data champion from New Zealand who has been a devoted transcriber of natural history materials in the Smithsonian Transcription Center has also given talks on WikiCite and the Biodiversity Heritage Library which described some of the unique challenges for heritage literature and metadata, and demonstrated how open access citations, images, and details gleaned from BHL and other open natural history digital repositories are applied to Wikimedia Foundation projects to support essential documentation of scientists, literature, and rare and endemic species.