(1) Context and motivation
(1.1) Introduction
In a conversation about archival metadata and geo coordinates in Wikidata, a Mastodon user claimed a postal address should be sufficient to identify and distinguish a certain archive from another.1 This is not wrong but machine-readable geo coordinates enable more use cases than that, e.g. geographical mappings of archival proveniences and archival institutions (Bemme, 2025a).
A postal address may be physically unique but simply specifying it in data objects is not enough to display the objects in queries in a geolocated manner. Digital coordinates are required. This motivated a call for blog post submissions, with a deadline set for the end of September 2025. This timeline was designed to provide sufficient time to gather case studies for applications, data queries, or the need for further development, data maintenance, and metadata editing in Wikidata and other Wikibase instances.
Hence, we modified our call for blog posts of 2021 for the multilingual knowledge of the near surroundings with Nearby queries (Bemme, 2021a) and asked again for contributions and edits to institutional archival metadata.
(1.2) Context and methods
(1.2.1.) Call for Edits 2025
Wikidata und FactGrid hold, among other, growing data from and about archival institutions, archival fonds, archival records and metadata of single documents. Archives, scientists and non-archival data activists produce, maintain and link this open data, which are potentially connected with research data, published research results and other forms of science communication activities.
We asked the audience of the web portal ‘Saxorum’ in a call for blog posts for contributions on “Geo data, Wikidata and Archives” in January 2025:
“How can archives benefit from geocoordinates of relevant data in Wikidata, from institutional and inventory-related metadata, from illustrations and other media in the linked sister portals of the Wikiverse, and from linked standard data and identifiers?
How can third parties help to qualify such data and connections with archive institutions and then make them more visible? ‘Database modelling and analysis in historical sciences’ is currently being carried out with FactGrid in a seminar at Friedrich Schiller University in Jena, particularly for documents. We are looking for guest contributions on these questions of regional studies work with open archive data in Saxony and beyond.” (Bemme & Munke 2025)
By calling for archival metadata we define Wikidata and FactGrid as a public digital infrastructure. For us, data quality in Wikidata is less about working on research questions and more a question of maintaining institutional metadata for the Digital Humanities and thereby attracting additional edits as a public good. Hence such research library work is a way of digital making by calling for edits openly.
(1.2.1) Background
The Wikidata query2 shows ‘archives at’ (P485) statements connected with their provenience worldwide, thus identifying the institution holding the archives of a certain person, association, institution etc. Contributors to the ‘Wikidata:WikiProject Archival Description’ aim to “create the world’s most comprehensive high-quality database of archival fonds and heritage collections, to represent archival structures within Wikidata where this is deemed useful and to ensure the interlinking between archival finding aids and Wikidata.”3
(1.2.2) Wikidata:WikiProject Germany
‘WikiProject Germany’ in Wikidata has been editing properties of German and Germany related GLAM institutions and sources since 2016.4 In 2021, at least one contributor to this project added archival data batches in Wikidata, which were subsequentially enriched by him, ourselves and others after having published the Saxorum call for contributions in 2025. For examples of Wikidata batches since November 2024, see the data description.
(1.2.3) FactGrid
FactGrid is a database for historians of the Gotha Research Centre operated by the computer lab of the Thuringian State and University Library (ThULB) in Jena. With support of Wikimedia Germany and NFDI4Memory (the consortium for the historically oriented humanities within the German National Research Data Infrastructure), FactGrid is using a MediaWiki with Wikidata’s Wikibase extension.5
We use the ‘Beam-me-up Tool’ based on WikibaseMigrator 0.0.216 to transfer metadata from Wikidata QIDs to FactGrid, aiming to complete Wikidata and FactGrid coverage especially for the archives in Saxony. In doing so, we form and use these open knowledge bases as basic regional digital infrastructures for GLAM institutions, research projects and data and citizen scientists on regional studies and the history of Saxony.
(1.2.4) Regional studies in Saxony with SLUB and Saxorum
As the regional library for Saxony, the Saxon State and University Library Dresden (SLUB) collects publications of all media types and fields of knowledge that relate to the state within its current and historical borders (Munke, 2026a). An important focus is making the collections as freely available as possible in accordance with the principles of open science, particularly open access, to which the SLUB has committed itself as a strategic goal (Bonte & Muschalek, 2019). In doing so, we rely primarily on the open infrastructures of the Wikiverse, especially Wikidata, Wikisource, Wikimedia Commons and Wikiversity (Matzke et al., 2021/22, pp. 420–431). Digital mediation and communication mainly takes place via the Saxorum regional portal and is accompanied by the associated science blog on the Hypotheses.org platform, where we also published the call. Our content therefore focuses on Saxony, its landscapes and sub-regions, its inhabitants and communities, and on the neighboring regions (Matzke et al., 2021/22). We describe this focus in reference to the accordingly named Wikidata special query function with the term ‘Nearby’, meaning geographically adjacent institutions, regions and the open metadata.7
(1.2.5) Regional bibliographic focus on open science communication
Methodologically, we use a subject area that forms the core of library work: the creation, enrichment, correction and expansion of bibliographic metadata that describes the form and content of media. The regional bibliography of Saxony (‘Sächsische Bibliografie’)8 is the database in which both the publications collected by the SLUB and online publications, such as blog posts, websites and much more relating to Saxony, are indexed. The bibliography is part of the K10plus union catalogue,9 in which only library staff can enter data. In addition, we collect metadata from posts from our own and other science blogs in parallel in Wikidata, tag them with keywords and enable their integration into free citation networks that anyone can contribute to. In this way, we aim to give individual contributions and their content additional visibility, link them to other content on the internet, and utilise the possibilities for visualization, offered by Wikidata-based tools such as Scholia.10 The field of scientific blogging and associated metadata is the area in which we have been most consistent in implementing our approach to science communication with the Wikiverse (Bemme & Munke, 2022; Bemme, 2021b) – an approach whose applicability to the field of archiving we examine in this article.
(1.3) Response
After the call for contributions and a supplementary article in the editorial blog of the German-language Hypotheses team (Bemme, 2025a) we observed ‘quickstatement’ activities by several wikimedians. We started editing institutional metadata of archives in Saxony ourselves. Open data projects like ‘Gestapo.Terror.Orte’ offered easy access to ongoing GLAM related research and citizen science activities in other regional contexts of Lower Saxony (Bemme, 2025b).
We received two contributions in response to the call for blog posts itself. Max Grund (2025) from Friedrich Schiller University Jena describes in his post ‘DigiHistDB – [the] Development of a self-learning module for database modelling and analysis in historical studies’ in archives of Upper Palatine.
Matthias Erfurth (2025), a wikimedian, citizen and data scientist in Dresden, started to deepen his interest in the work of archives as local heritage sources as well as regional data hubs and offered his learnings to the Saxorum call for blog posts on a small website with queries and references. It contains a query of archives nearby the Elbe river,11 linked historical manors and its historical descriptions (transcribed in Wikisource, metadata in Wikidata)12 plus statistics for properties in Wikidata items of archival institutions.
A main output and impact of the call for blog posts consisted in eight months of public conversations about archives and open archival metadata, leading to agenda setting and additional QIDs for German archives in Wikidata. Editing caused new statements and links by known and unknown contributors. The data set is not complete yet. More geo coordinates should be added to enable comprehensive data use and relevance for new applications.
(2) Dataset
The dataset is not bounded and consists of connected entities in Wikidata and FactGrid. The data is open by default. The dataset potentially consists of all entities in Wikidata in subclasses of ‘archives’ (Q56648173) and instances of ‘archive type’ (Q636033). Specifically, we are discussing those items from archives in various fields that have been expanded either (partially) automatically or manually since the call. Our focus is not a before-and-after comparison, which would require a great deal of technical effort and time, but rather the communication and data cultures that became apparent during the editing process. Editing dates and dynamics per QID can be observed in the specific version histories of each item.
Examples (archival institutions: Wikidata/FactGrid)
Municipal archive Chemnitz (Q27973151)/(Q1194887), Saxony State Archives (Q2378803)/(Q2378803), Saxony State Archives Leipzig (Q2324720)/(Q743688), Freiberg University Archive (Q81522199)/(Q1122208), Archiv der Stiftung Sächsischer Architekten (Q130456917), Forum Queeres Archiv München e. V. – LGBTIQ* in History and Culture (Q100743737), Municipal archive Taunusstein (Q130756578), Orff-Zentrum München (Q97940516), State Archives Administration of Rhineland-Palatinate (Q1788003), Hesse civil register archive (Q2072398), Gemeindearchiv Waldaschaff (Q133250939), Chorherrenstift Beromünster (Q81164675), Sulzbach-Rosenberg Municipal archive (Q28719818)/(Q1089517).
Examples (types of archives: Wikidata/FactGrid)
Municipal archives (Q604177)/(Q499294), regional archive (Q27032392)/(Q1758509), state archives (Q52341833)/(Q743363), district archive (Germany) (Q130757255)/(Q1758195), university archives (Q2496264)/(Q529854), company archives (Q10605195)/(Q902414), public archives for building records and construction documents (Q136027937)/(Q1758194) etc.13
Creation dates
Various: QuickStatements and individual edits before and after the public call for contributions. For details see the following batches and the version histories of specific items in Wikidata. List, potentially not complete:
Project page
https://de.wikiversity.org/wiki/Projekt:Archive_%2B_Wikidata_2025
(3) Discussion
Archivists, archival institutions, their users, researchers of historical sciences, wikimedians in and outside of GLAM institutions and citizen scientists, i.e. in historical societies and associations, are potential stakeholder groups of the activities documented in this discussion paper.
In the regional Saxony context, local government bodies, Wikimedia communities and individuals in Dresden, Leipzig and Chemnitz are addressed and potentially supported with better open institutional metadata in Wikidata and FactGrid. Through calling for blog posts and data edits, along with the following communication on social media, we aimed to raise awareness for Wikidata and FactGrid as open data hubs in regional heritage projects and for interinstitutional collaboration based on commonly shared knowledge, agenda, methods and data.14
From a regional library perspective this work raises questions regarding follow up data maintenance, roundtripping,15 governance and cooperation between GLAM institutions and civic open knowledge and open data initiatives in society. Who cares about open archival metadata? Who should care (more) and how? Who benefits? Who learned something? How to use archives and library data for open educational resources? Where else could the data be used? And what’s next?
(3.1) Regional Open GLAM cooperation
Following our call, we now discuss nearby perspectives in regional wikidata use cases in Saxony, focusing on archival institutions nearby in Poland, Czech Republic, and nearby German States, as defined above. We demonstrate that indexing archives in Wikidata can foster cooperation and networking among memory institutions. Editing and teaching to edit Wikidata, Commons, FactGrid or Wikisource among GLAM can be seen as opportunities for knowledge transfer and archival and library science communication. Speaking, writing and blogging about these digital skills is a form of public transmission of regional heritage (Bemme, 2023c).
(3.1.1) Saxon State Archive, archives in Saxony, Saxon regional sciences
In 2023 the Saxon State Archives in Leipzig offered a ‘Wikimedian in Residence’ position in a part time delegation of one of the authors to the Saxon State Library, resulting, for example, in map queries for the archive district of the Leipzig State Archive and other Saxon State Archive divisions. Wikidata workshops in Leipzig and Dresden for archivists took place within the five months of the residency (Bemme, 2023a; Bemme, 2023b). In the meantime, a federal volunteer at Saxon State Archive Leipzig learned to link and map the archival funds with their proveniences and inventory creators (Bemme, 2023d).16
Joint activities with municipal archives in Saxony resulted in the publication and visibility of digital contents such as single documents, rather than adding data or data batches to Wikidata. In doing so, we are able to support each other, which is especially important because archival institutions often lack the personnel and time to manage additional open GLAM activities with the Wikimedia movement. The majority of archives in Saxony are one-person archives with only one part-time position or a single full-time position, and only 15% of institutions employ more than five people (Kluttig, 2019, p. 20). In state institutions such as the Saxon State Archives or the SLUB, the topic is one of many, although at the SLUB it is institutionalised to a certain extent through part-time positions dedicated to it in connection with the institution’s citizen science activities (Bemme & Munke, 2021).
Both the SLUB and Saxon State Archives are governmental agencies collecting and managing regional heritage and large digital collections, connecting public services and institutions, its employees, users and other stakeholders, physical holdings and data. In principle Linked Open Data calls for connected services, infrastructure, research and development. Growing attention for open crowdsourcing and citizen science methods requires institutional readiness and teaching skills to use heritage collections. Teaching the GLAM personnel and users to use linked open cultural heritage data should help to legitimate additional public efforts for the digitisation transformation in cultural institutions.
Prospectively, institutional guidelines in archives and libraries will increasingly adopt digital and distributed modes for detailed indexing and linking records through open metadata. Working together for the Wikimedia residency and on joint publications on common topics like citizen science,17 Wikidata or archival metadata helps to deepen ties between research libraries and archives in Saxony (Kluttig, 2025).
(3.1.2) Query and community development
The activities described here are based mostly on informal relations with colleagues in GLAM institutions, in civic associations or individuals in the Wikimedia movement. Ideas, elaborated queries, small common projects and publications in Wikimedia Commons or in blogs of these cultural institutions come out of continued exchange. Community development conducted this way is a kind of informal infrastructure for open heritage collections. It consists in ad hoc cooperations, spontaneous digital prototyping for ideas, paying public attention, facilitating meet ups online and offline, long term editathon projects, teaching and openness for unpredictable potentially unlimited project durations of independent citizen science initiatives.
At the same time, the activities repeatedly touch upon institutionalised forms of cooperation. For example, the SLUB coordinates the Saxon State Digitisation Programme (‘Landesdigitalisierungsprogramm’, LDP), which involves the digitisation of valuable written and cultural heritage in the holdings of various cultural and memory institutions in Saxony (Munke, 2023, pp. 77–79).18 We use the Wikidata property ‘geo locations’ (P625) to map the digital collections of these institutions. A Wikidata query19 visualises institutional QIDs linking ‘described by’ (P1343) statements to the web portal ‘sachsen.digital’ (Q122723233), the programme’s central platform.
In the ‘Erinnerungskultur digital’ network (ERDI),20 an open network of institutions and initiatives to strengthen cooperation between volunteers, memory institutions and institutions of historical and political education, we use Wikidata to map the participating institutions and to develop a search application that enables users to search for their thematic focal points, including those of institutions that are not part of the network. The application is also based on a Wikidata query,21 which has been expanded with several features for a future integration into the Saxorum regional portal. At the same time, advances in generative AI models are making such queries more accessible by reducing the need for advanced knowledge of the SPARQL query language.
(3.1.3) Neighbours in Germany and in Europe
Archival institutions in places of border regions next to Saxony hold fonds and records relevant for research projects on Saxon history in Poland, in Czechia or in the German federal states Brandenburg, Saxony-Anhalt, Thuringia, or Bavaria. How could we map archives or collections in Wikidata nearby specific geographical areas, historical regions or existing countries?
The surveys ‘Linked Open Data (and Wikidata) awareness in Polish LAM sector’ (Siwecka 2021; 2025) show limits of knowledge for linked open data exchanges between libraries, archives and museums. We assume similar results for such institutions in Germany. From a regional history perspective, it makes sense to not stop at the present-days borders when asking for map queries and improved open metadata, since borders and territorial affiliations have shifted several times throughout history. In our case, the term ‘Saxony’ has been used for areas far beyond today’s state borders (Bünz et al., 2025). Therefore, additional archival institutions and their holdings along state borders inside Germany or in Poland and Czechia would offer a more comprehensive overview for historical regions such as Lower Silesia (Saxony and Poland), the Vogtland spanning the German states of Bavaria, Saxony and Thuringia and north-western Bohemia in the Czech Republic, or Upper Lusatia as a Central European bridge region between Saxony, Brandenburg, Poland, and Czechia (Munke 2026b).
In a more topic-centered perspective one could ask how to map institutions in Wikidata with holdings for specific subjects and fields of work. The German Historical Institute Paris published insights into French GLAM institutions for research on France–Germany relations.22 Wikidata allows us to enrich, publish, link and query data statements and details of digital history openly in combination with open science communication tools, e.g. blogs. Topic-centered metadata improvement could therefore add information such as geo data statements for archives in France and Germany with collections in fields of common history. A tool-centered approach could then use Scholia to visualise locations, networks and bibliographic data of scholarly literature, its authors and citations of relevant publications.
(3.1.4) Who cares? How?
Who is responsible for institutional metadata, its quality, linking, the use and sharing? The archivists themselves, librarians calling for contributions or wikimedians crossing the way? We are still looking for reliable connections with neighbouring GLAM institutions to maintain open cultural data sets and to enable data-roundtripping, which “consists in the reciprocal synchronisation of data between and other platforms with which its content is interconnected”.23
Beyond geo coordinates of archives in Germany, we added and edited archive addresses, official websites and international identifiers via the VIAF cluster24 amongst others. It is not clear yet, if aggregating web portals such as Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek/Archivportal or Archives Portal Europe will use, check and synchronise with Wikidata. Open metadata for Saxon GLAM institutions may regionally and locally be part of our focus and interest in regionalistic studies in Saxony at SLUB. One could ask: Why catalog archives (or other GLAM) in Wikidata at all? And whether to catalog fonds or single documents too.
Some digital humanists care about archival meta data. Max Grund, a historian from Saxony, explained for Sulzbach-Rosenberg in Upper Palatine how to use FactGrid for archival sources (Grund, 2025).
While completing this data openly, we first aim to edit, link and enrich data that already exists in Wikidata in order to make sense of it: authority files, institutional metadata, metadata of linked archival contexts and provenances. The special query ‘What Links Here’ can be interpreted as an indicator for data density and linkages as a sign of relevance of each existing item in Wikidata and FactGrid.
(3.2) Wiki-based methods nearby for open regional studies
Heritage institutions such as archives and libraries seek ways and specific communities to get their digital contents in use and to legitimate additional efforts for the digital transformation in its collections, educational resources and practices. The case of SLUB as a state library, regional library and university library offers various links to participatory research agendas at campuses, with individual and organised volunteers, their associations and institutional public and private bodies doing regionally relevant sciences, citizen science and data driven research and development. We found lively communities around Wikipedia, Wikisource and Wikimedia Commons in Dresden (Förster, 2024, pp. 153–154) and other places in Saxony that helped to fulfil our mission to collect and open sources and knowledge of Saxon history (Bemme et al., 2022). The focus on geo data linked in Wikidata items evolved especially in the first months of the COVID pandemic. Using the ‘Nearby’ special queries in Wikidata and the sister portals have been logical next steps for regional data work on daily live facts, bibliography metadata and the visualisation for knowledge communication purposes.
We define this field of work as Open Citizen Science (Bemme & Munke 2021): citizen science and crowdsourcing undertaken with open methods and tools and its presentation or publication with open access in open environments. The Wikiverse and the Wikimedia movement therefore are not exclusive solutions. From an institutional point of view, wiki-based environments can help foster connections to heritage communities and data sets. These communities are sociotopes in local and regional civic contexts built on global technical wiki environments, open digital tools, bottom-up commitment and rule-based governance. Archives and libraries, their users, their public funding bodies and societies can all benefit from them.
Wikidata offers valuable infrastructure with data sets for regional digital history research. Linked with Wikisource, Wikimedia Commons and the other portals of the Wikimedia family, geo coordinates allow citizen data scientists and open knowledge initiatives developing use cases for research, data management, data sharing, visualisation and storage. FactGrid connects citizen scientists, data sets and communities in Wikidata with research data projects at GLAM and research institutions (Simons, 2023).
(4) Conclusion
Our outreach yielded limited results, as we did not attract more than one blog post and a webpage with more use cases for “Geo data, Wikidata and Archives”. The awareness for Wikidata seems to be as expandable in the archival sector as well as in other GLAM institutions. This might be because of resource constraints, lack of knowledge and skills or competing objectives and priorities. However, we achieved a lot of edits and batches with addresses, identifiers, geo coordinates, labels and descriptions in Wikidata from the ranks of the various wiki communities. The data set of German archives grew massively. More editing has to be undertaken.
Calling for these contributions let us to focus on archives in Saxony and beyond since January 2025. Further steps will include communicating about local and regional benefits of well-maintained GLAM data for maps, linking open regional science and its products and smart city applications in regional and neighboring international research contexts nearby.
At SLUB Wikidata and FactGrid serve as open data infrastructure, for participatory projects and crowdsourcing, as well as for the transmission of open methods in research data management in GLAM, for Citizen Science and Wikimedia-based projects. Institutionally we act at an early stage of awareness for such Linked Open Data exchanges and data roundtripping, while at the same time trying to support and train other institutions through bilateral cooperation in specific projects and within programs such as the State Digitisation Programme. Furthermore, the call remains open: for blog posts, edits in Wikidata and FactGrid, and other contributions and regional collaborations in Open GLAM institutions nearby.
Notes
[2] https://w.wiki/7zwE.
[4] See: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:WikiProject_Germany and the archival data description at https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:WikiProject_Germany/Archivwesen.
[5] FactGrid, https://database.factgrid.de/.
[7] https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Special:Nearby executes a query which shows Wikidata items from the geographical vicinity of the device with which the user is using Wikidata (“places around you”), provided that the web browser used is permitted to evaluate geolocation.
[10] Scholia, https://scholia.toolforge.org/.
[11] See the SPARQL query https://w.wiki/FjPs.
[12] See the SPARQL query https://w.wiki/FnjV.
[13] For a comprehensive list see the SPARQL query https://w.wiki/FiRb.
[14] For examples of such data sets outside the approaches discussed here, see the FactGrid blog, https://blog.factgrid.de.
[16] See the SPAQRL query https://w.wiki/7FFD.
[17] Cf. the chapter ‘Archives, libraries, museums and science shops’ (pp. 111–117) in Bonn et al. (2022), which has been co-authored, among others, by the head of the division Leipzig of the Saxon State Archives and one of the authors of this paper.
[18] See the Wikimedia Commons Category and Wikidada Infobox of https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Landesdigitalisierungsprogramm_(Sachsen).
[19] See the SPARQL query https://w.wiki/CZ9T.
[20] Meaning ‘Digital Culture of Remembrance’, https://erdi.hypotheses.org.
[21] See the SPARQL query https://w.wiki/Fbef.
[23] See the SPARQL query https://w.wiki/FjPs.
[24] VIAF, https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Property:P214.
[25] We edited CRediT (Q25851719) and CRedIT contributor role (Q25851843) in Wikidata, https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Special:WhatLinksHere/Q25851843.
Acknowledgements
Many thanks to Thekla Kluttig, Matthias Erfurth, Max Grund, Alexander Winkler and User:Printstream for feedback, edits, queries and quick statements!
Competing Interests
The authors have no competing interests to declare.
Author Contributions
Jens Bemme, Martin Munke: Conceptualization, Data curation, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing.25