The School of Information at The University of Texas at Austin congratulates Prof. Hanlin Li, who in July received a grant from the Wikimedia Research Fund for her proposal “Informing Memory Institutions and Humanities Researchers of the Broader Impact of Open Data Sharing via Wikidata.” The grant, which totals $49,450, involves both outreach to GLAM institutions (galleries, libraries, archives, and museums) and the proposed creation of a tool to help facilitate the use of Wikidata by such organizations.
Wikidata is a collaboratively edited, open-source, document-oriented database featuring over 1.6 billion entries. It is increasingly a key resource both for human efforts to gather non-paywalled, well-indexed, and trustworthy information, as well for cutting-edge algorithmic models seeking the same.
“Wikidata knowledge gets fed into search engines, Wikipedia, or even large language models and AI technologies,” Li explains. “We're looking into how to help libraries, archives, and museums better understand the potential impact of contributing to Wikidata. The goal is to address knowledge gaps on the web about lesser-known authors, artifacts, buildings, geographic locations, historical landmarks – the kinds of things that archives and libraries care about and have valuable information and metadata on.”
The grant project is an outgrowth of a recent paper that Li wrote with former iSchool professor Amelia Acker and PhD student Riya Sinha. Titled "Data Work in Memory Institutions: Why and How Information Professionals use Wikidata,” the paper will be presented at the 2025 ACM SIGCHI Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing (CSCW) this October.
Sinha remains involved in the current grant-based project, and Li has also partnered with Prof. Nicholas Vincent of Simon Fraser University on the project. Li says she was initially inspired to pursue this line of research by a May 2024 workshop at the Texas Conference on Digital Libraries, organized by the Harry Ransom Center and UT Libraries, focused on helping librarians learn to use Wikidata.
Li’s grant-funded project aims to deliver an open, free tool for memory institutions. “Our plan is to build a tool that can help these memory institutions see the impact they can make, and then help them to prioritize and organize their hours spent on contributing to Wikidata,” she says.
As a long-time fan of the Wikimedia Foundation and user of its resources, including Wikipedia, this grant is a special one for Li. “It means a lot to me personally, because I've admired what the Wikimedia community has been doing over the years,” she says. “It's great that they showed interest in this work and want to support it.”
The Wikimedia-funded project is part of Li’s research program on investigating how data affects algorithmic models. Another grant Li has been awarded this summer is a Texas Global Faculty Research Seed Grant Proposal Spring 2025 grant for $10,000 to organize a workshop on algorithmic collective action. Li's project, “Fostering Sustainable and Equitable Worker-AI Collaboration Through Algorithmic Collective Action," will facilitate a conversation touching on how coordinated data manipulations might affect algorithms and will be presented at the upcoming 2025 Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems in San Diego. She’ll partner on that project with Prof. Elliot Creager of University of Waterloo, along with a panel of co-organizers across the globe.