Tuesday, April 22, 2014

#Wikidata - Rulan Chao Pian and the Otto Kinkeldey Award

Mrs Rulan Chao Pian was a distinguished musicologist. She was one of the first female professors at Harvard University and, she received the Otto Kinkeldey award in 1968.

Currently there is only one recipient of the Otto Kinkeldey award. There is no Wikipedia article for it and finding more recipients is not easy. Only 20 Harvard University employees are known; obviously calculating a sex ratio based on these numbers gets you an irrelevant number.

What Wikidata needs are people who are eager to provide us with the data they care for. When Sarah Stierch asks "are there lists of things I could work on", my answer is: "work on the things you know, the things you love and even, the things you get paid for".

The beauty of Wikidata is that as long as statements are verifiable, it does not matter much who adds them. I have no problem with a Harvard intern adding its professors as "employees" and adding pertinent information like when they joined Harvard or became tenured professors. I welcome people from the American Musicological Society when they add all the winners of its awards. Obviously,the Russian, the Chinese and the Indonesian counterparts of the AMS are equally welcome.

When you are involved in a certain field, please make sure that your field is well presented. With tools like Reasonator, WDQ and AutoList you can find how well it is represented at any time. When you find that additional properties are needed in Wikidata, we can discuss this. But do get involved.
Thanks,
      GerardM

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