First, let’s link to Wikionary to explain the title of this post for those who don’t know the reference and are unable to appreciate the author’s clever wordplay.

Next, let’s recap.

Wikidata is arguably the most approachable, useful, and accessible linked data platform that is freely available to use. It is the data platform of the people, for the people, and made possible by the work of volunteers.

Many of those Wikidata volunteers are associated with Wikimedia Deutschland and, literally mere hours after I had published my lament of how Wikidata is reaching its capacity (in its current form), I read this announcement on Mastodon:

Wikiba.se got a makeover! Visit our website to watch our new learning video, and recent use cases from the Wikibase community.

And from that website, Wikiba.se, I learned that the ability to set up one’s own Wikibase platform has become considerably easier than when I had first looked into it and was scared off by how technically daunting it is.

Wikibase.cloud promises your own free Wikibase that can be set up in 5 minutes.

This is a very Wikimedia solution to curbing future data being added to Wikidata that isn’t explicitly to support Wikipedia: making Wikibase — the platform that Wikidata runs on — readily and easily able to spin up and to federate your Wikidata queries against.

It looks like The University of Leeds has already taken advantage and has their own base called The University of Leeds Identifiers.

About three years ago, I had looked into the possibility of a locally hosted Wikibase to act as shared source of authority records or common identifiers for Scholar’s Portal then-nascent Scholaris project, but the prospects were too daunting.

Thanks to the good work involved in supporting Wikibase, these possibility are open to them, and all other GLAM organizations:

And now the question that I am currently sitting with is whether I should pursue setting up a Wikibase specifically for Canadian legal research and data.

As Tim Knight wrote in Break On Through to the Other Side: The Library and Linked Data (2011), linked and semantic data is well suited for the purposes of meaning making in the field of law.

When we break our information out of static records and re-build them into statements, we are able query and make sense of textual information is very useful ways. For example, here is a Wikidata query that demonstrates how the opinions of Canadian Supreme Court judges can be expressed as linked data. You could then add to this search to learn how the judges have previously made decisions pertaining to various subject matter or other conditions.

For the time being, I’m not going to create a separate Wikibase.

That’s because I have found that Zotero is the SQLite database that meets my needs for my next legal research project that I’m currently working on.

But, that being said, if you are interested in working together to build a Wikibase to support Canadian legal research, please be in touch!