Wikidata

Wikidata:WikiCite/Researchers in Switzerland

< Wikidata:WikiCite
Sponsored by Wikimedia Switzerland

This is a side project funded by WMCH as part and is part of Wikidata:WikiCite/Switzerland

This initiative can be viewed as the second attempt at achieving comprehensive coverage of researchers within a country, following the organized example of IRIS proect in Italy.

History edit

This project was created as part of the Wiki Science Competition 2021 activities, and it has been further expanded in preparation for Wiki Science Competition 2023, getting more and more structured over the time.

Main goal edit

The primary objective is to expedite the generation of Wikidata entries pertaining to post-docs, qualified technicians, researchers, and professors engaged in scientific and technical fields within the universities, laboratories, hospitals, and research centers of Switzerland (and Liechtenstein). The focus is primarly on individuals active in technical and scientific domains, recognizing that boundaries can sometimes be nuanced. While more structured for scientific and technological profiles, institutional IDs from research repositories are proposed and reconciled without distinction, for example

Given the scale of this initiative, the aim is not to create exhaustive and refined entries, but rather to generate thousands of entries with sufficient clarity and basic information (affiliation, gender, birth date, 1-2 external IDs) for later integration into Wikidata's standard workflow. If entries already exist, they are enhanced, but the primary objective remains to address gaps in coverage. While connecting researchers to their publications is not the primary goal, this meticulous "mapping" will significantly simplify such tasks for future users.

Steps edit

Two main axes of items management are involved

Here a list Contacted Institutions for future steps

Statistics edit

See this page

Other related edits edit

Items of institutions or departments created during the project edit

Items of institutions improved during the project edit

The improvement is mostly aliases to improve future reconciliation. Alternative names are extracted from sources on-line and IDs

Also the use of Google Scholar organization ID (P11961) was checked for all items (the above list does not include its siple insertion)

Identical or similar names refined or created on the way edit

These individuals are quite often researchers, morespecifically they are not Swiss or are/were not active in Switzerland. While they are not intended to be included in this work, their inclusion aims to preempt confusion, as information related to the can be accessed while working to clean up metadata.

Mistakes found in external archives edit

This list do not include main target IDs of the projects, see here

Future work edit

This might be useful to improve the usability of the data (in-depth quality and minimal confusion)

Messy general situations with common names edit

See this dedicated page

Missing given names edit

  • Najla
  • Dimche
  • Urs-Beat
  • Rolphe
  • Anne-Linda
  • Feiyi
  • Rimjhim

Missing family names edit

To be done in the long term, listed for statistical purpose

  • Sprumont
  • Westerwinter
  • Fauchère
  • Osztovics
  • Grutta
  • Rosat
  • Tadorian
  • Raffournier
  • Rigozzi (segnalato)
  • Valterio
  • Plomb
  • Gazareth
  • Corbellari (segnalato)
  • Francescutto (segnalato)
  • Hemati
  • Vachtsevanou
  • Raetzo
  • Hosi
  • Maskarinec
  • Leontsinis
  • Cabalzar
  • Buetler/Bütler
  • Zurwerra
  • Bonesana
  • Danani
  • Sapozhnik
  • Stenflo
  • Cannelle
  • Hajnsek
  • Gressin
  • Bonesana
  • Derboni
  • Zaffalon
  • Sharygina
  • Calciolari
  • Bezani
  • Morese
  • Fiordelli
  • Schönweger
  • Broffoni
  • Del Notaro
  • Jaeggli
  • Cheridito
  • Heiri
  • Delaloye
  • Debbané
  • Aymoz
  • Ganguin
  • Joerin
  • Bukenberger
  • Del Duce
  • Csucker

Comments edit

  • The problem of similar names is much stronger in the German-speaking world than in other areas. This scenario will take a while to clean up. The core groups in the Swiss academia are names in German, French, Italian and English (since it is international and western-leaning, the main group not involved in a Swiss national language it's them). Other areas are active and they can be tricky (e.g. Spanish names) but statistically these are the 4 main groups to address. Now...
Anglophones are often in external archives which are more precise on the issue of homonyms and use of middle names, probably because of some ongoing and recurring needs in the past; they already faced it and they reasonably deal with it in many international databases.
Francophones rely mostly on French centralized archive that are more or less focused, with limited mistakes. Maybe there are missing information, but not huge mistakes.
People with Italian names rely on a big community of volunteers active in Italy, so information on external databases might be problematic but Wikidata items are quite good and they are a driving force for improvement.
So the main problem before getting an efficient use of Wikidata items of researchers in Switzerland is probably the maintenance of common recurring German names; clearly the lack of care in certain "areas" of Germany and Austria is not helping at the moment and if Switzerland wants to use the database, some additional maintenance on the other side of the border might be required, at least at the beginning. For social and human science, the problem is probably bigger.
  • We tried to focus on the technical and scientific fields. So far, the areas of particle physics, architecture, informatics and computer science, geology are those requiring to fill more gaps. Also, some medical profiles that stopped publishing in the early 2000s could show gaps on Wikidata despite having external IDs. That's why we have started with those areas. They require more careful manual insertion. Biologists and chemists for example can be quickly checked with some massive OpenRefine import.
  • The researcher with highest H-index found amongst newly-created items is currently Roger D. Hersch (Q124300857) (January 2024, H index 23). Most of researchers with H-index above 20 are usually created at least via ORCID, the biggest gap is in profile who have not been active after the early 2010s.

Future developments edit

Based on IDs to be created, future literacy events can be created in cooperation with Swiss Universities and learned institutions, if interested. The goal is to keep up-to-date the database, make the ID coverage more robust for the existing items, and fill gaps outside the technical and scientific fields.

Queries edit

See subpage

References edit

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