Adding Every Arabic Periodical Published Before 1930 to Wikidata: Moving the Scholarly Crowd-Sourcing Project Jarāʾid to the Digital Commons

This paper documents the contribution of comprehensive bibliographic data on all Arabic periodicals published worldwide until 1930 to Wikidata. We discuss the need for such a data set, which originated with scholarly crowd-sourcing project Jarāʾid and comprises information on more than 3000 periodicals, about 2700 editors, and almost 350 holding institutions, the weaknesses of our original approach, and how the move to Wikidata, the largest public and open knowledge graph, addresses them. We demonstrate how Wikidata also satisfies the two predominant use cases of this data set not currently served by available library and discovery systems. Finally, we show how the move to Wikidata generates continuous engagement with wider Wikimedia communities and demonstrate the reusability of our approach with a second data set of periodicals from the Ottoman Empire.