Adding Every Arabic Periodical Published Before 1930 to Wikidata: Moving the Scholarly Crowd-Sourcing Project Jarāʾid to the Digital Commons

This paper documents the contribution of comprehensive bibliographic data on all Arabic periodicals published before 1930 to Wikidata, the largest public and open knowledge graph. The dataset originated with the scholarly crowdsourcing project Jarāʾid and comprises information on more than 3,000 periodicals, about 2,700 editors and almost 350 holding institutions. As a living union list of Arabic periodicals, the dataset alleviates the infrastructural weaknesses of library catalogues and discovery systems, as well as the epistemic violence of knowledge ecologies. The move to Wikidata addresses the socio-technical shortcomings of our original approach by making the dataset available in a FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable, reusable) and five-star Linked Open Data environment. In addition, the platform provides multilingual interfaces and robust user management and version control, which significantly improves the usability and maintenance of evolving datasets. The paper details workflows and data models and demonstrates the reusability of our approach in other contexts with a second dataset of periodicals from the Ottoman Empire. Finally, the paper shows how the move to Wikidata generates continuous engagement with wider Wikimedia communities that significantly broaden our knowledge about periodicals and their holdings.