My First Wikidata QuickStatements Project: Documenting Professors at Eckerd College

I love my alma mater, Eckerd College, and I recently discovered EC Scholar, a website that showcases faculty research profiles and publications. This seemed like a good opportunity for me to learn about QuickStatements, a Wikidata tool that particularly interests me as I'm developing something similar for OpenLibrary.

While listening to Crying in H Mart, my hackNY Secret Santa gift, I used a little JS to scrape ~100 faculty profiles from EC Scholar. I manually verified each profile against Wikidata and created entries for faculty members who weren't yet represented. This manual process enabled me to quickly add LinkedIn profiles and other identifiers via the Wikidata for Web extension. Using QuickStatements, I updated each entry with the following attributes: human, gender, English speaker, Eckerd College employment (including the source URL), and a described-at URL.

The experience was both straightforward and enjoyable. Although I had been aware of QuickStatements for years, this was my first practical use of the tool. Essentially, I created this spreadsheet containing the IDs and fields I wanted to add and then pasted it into the tool. Most individuals did not yet have Wikidata entries, and I'm glad I could add them, as it should increase the discoverability of their research. It was also fun to learn more about their research interests and academic contributions.

Additionally, while working on this, I improved the web page title extract pattern field for several properties, enabling the Wikidata for Web extension to scrape the names for more properties.