Final considerations and future prospects
Wikibase is emerging as a robust, collaborative, open, and sustainable infrastructure that can offer a structured ecosystem, particularly for cultural heritage and digital humanities projects, enabling data interoperability, discoverability, and long-term preservation.
Through its commitment to openness, technical interoperability, and community-centered governance, Wikibase can become a foundational component within global linked open data ecosystems. Previous work has identified Wikibase as a powerful and valuable tool for librarians and LOD (Godby et al, 2019). Emerging research data infrastructures such as data spaces enable new ways of publishing and accessing research data according to key aspects such as transparency, trustworthiness and security. Other platforms such as Galaxy Community Hub[1] and the European Cultural Heritage Cloud[2] which is anchored and aligned with Wikimedia Foundation in terms of the principles of Open Science and Digital Commons, will promote inclusion and democratise access to knowledge and digital assets for citizens and researchers. Wikibase can play a relevant role in these new data infrastructures not only as a data source but also as a collaborative environment to create knowledge bases.
By embedding Wikibase into their emerging infrastructures, institutions can unlock new possibilities for research, public engagement, and collaborative knowledge building, while retaining control and sovereignty over their data.
Some aspects that still need to be addressed to establish a more sustainable, ethical, and impactful approach to data stewardship with Wikibase for the field of Digital Humanities include:
- Provision of training materials in known platforms such as the Social Sciences and Humanities Open Marketplace[3] to facilitate the adoption of Wikibase as a tool for data publication and reuse.
- Promote the adoption of Wikibase in platforms such as DARIAH Campus[4] to plan, design, and implement educational programs based on Wikibase and DH.
We conclude with more general considerations, regarding sustainability and ethical issues:
- Regarding the long-term sustainability of Wikibase implementations, institutions must develop robust community engagement strategies that foster active participation and collaboration among diverse stakeholders, with accessible training programs.
- For assessing the success of Wikibase as a knowledge infrastructure, institutions should define measurable KPIs aligned with their strategic goals, enabling clear impact measurement toward funders and financing institutions. This aspect, critical for demonstrating the value of open infrastructures, remains underexplored in existing literature on Wikibase implementations.
- While the technical dimensions of FAIR principles are well aligned with Wikibase capabilities, these should be complemented by CARE principles (Collective Benefit, Authority to Control, Responsibility, and Ethics) (Carroll et al, 2020) to ensure that data stewardship is human-centered, ethically grounded, and attentive to Indigenous and marginalized community needs. Current literature on Wikibase has yet to fully emphasize its potential contributions to the human and ethical dimensions of data stewardship, highlighting an opportunity for further exploration and alignment with global ethical frameworks.
