Think about the last time you watched a show on Netflix or Max and a new character walks on screen. They look familiar, but you can’t quite place why. Perhaps you go down the IMDb (Internet Movie Database) rabbit hole and see they had a bit part from a show you watched 10 years ago. Maybe you go to Wikipedia to find out more about their family or just their height. But do you ever think about where this information comes from?
IMDb started as a database in the 1980s on a predecessor to the World Wide Web called Usenet, created and updated by a bunch of people who just love movies. Now an Amazon subsidiary, IMDb still relies heavily on users to provide information. How did I find this out? Using Wikipedia! Wikipedia, a project hosted by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation, relies solely on volunteer editors. Every time you look something up on Wikipedia, the information you see is created by a person who thought it was worthwhile, whether it’s a scholar, a professor, or just an ordinary person like you or me!
You might ask, “What does IMDb or Wikipedia have to do with Illinois State University’s libraries?” which is an understandable question. For my internship in Special Collections, I wanted to find a way to combine my interest in contributing to the greater Wiki community with showcasing part of Milner Library’s digital collections. It turns out that the library has a lot of collections related to circuses, road shows, and vaudeville performances of the 1800s and 1900s. To narrow the project scope, I chose to focus on The Life and Legacy of Buffalo Bill collection, a name that I recognized. Buffalo Bill’s show, aptly named Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, was well-known and even traveled internationally. But Buffalo Bill, born William Frederick Cody, did not achieve this on his own.
Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show had an extraordinarily diverse cast, including Cody’s friends and family, Native Americans, and immigrants from all over. Instead of focusing on the well-documented Buffalo Bill himself, my supervisor and I decided to find a way to showcase the many other people involved. To do this, I have been working within Wikipedia’s sister project, Wikidata. Like Wikipedia, Wikidata relies on volunteer editors but focuses much more on structured, linked data that is human and machine readable. Instead of writing a sentence about where and when someone is born like on Wikipedia, Wikidata entries have separate “statements” for the birth date and place of birth.
Buffalo Bill’s Wikipedia article:
Buffalo Bill’s Wikidata entry:
For an example from this project, the image at the top of the page shows nine men involved with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show. Of the pictured cowboys, Joe Esquivel, Antonio Esquivel, Billy Bullock, Johnny Baker, and Jim Mitchell now have records (the Wikidata equivalent to a Wikipedia article). Unfortunately, the remaining cowboys have more common names and less available information about their lives. Some might even think that people such as Johnny Baker (Buffalo Bill’s foster son and a founder of the Buffalo Bill Museum) do not need entries because they are not “notable”.
The definition of notability is another difference between Wikidata and Wikipedia. Wikipedia notability is focused on “sufficiently significant attention by the world at large and over a period of time” and is subject to frequent arguments about what is worth an article and what isn’t. Wikidata’s notability standards are much more focused on usability and connection with other items within the Wiki community. Entries on the remaining cowboys from the previous example—Billy Johnson, Dick Johnson, and Tom Duffy—add contextual information to Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show and can link to the image within Milner’s digital collection. These minimal entries also highlight the collaborative nature of Wikidata since they provide a starting point for other researchers to fill out more information!
An image of Buffalo Bill with his four sisters provides a second useful example of the power of Wikidata to add context to people, places, and events. Unsurprisingly, Buffalo Bill already had a Wikidata item, but an item also already existed for one of his sisters, Helen Cody. Someone else had found it worthwhile to create an entry for Helen Cody, probably because she is a published author. That meant that I could add more statements to the existing item, such as her birth and death place, instead of starting from scratch. I then created entries for the other three sisters, Mary Cody Decker, Julia Cody Goodman, and Eliza Cody Myers, which links them to their siblings and parents and contextualizes the picture.
The Life and Legacy of Buffalo Bill collection and the Circus Route Books collection are easy to access through Milner’s digital library platform. Of course, Wikipedia and Wikidata are also available to the public. Maybe the next time you find some interesting information, whether it’s for a project or while out and about in the world, you can take a few minutes to pop over to the Wikimedia world and put it on there.
Jason Sharp is a graduate student getting a Master of Professional Science in Digital Curation and Management at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He is currently completing a fall semester internship in Milner Library’s Special Collections.
