Beyond Notability
Give a brief description of your project, specifically mentioning why you chose to use Wikibase.
We are researching histories of women active in archaeology, history and heritage in the UK between 1870 and 1950. We chose Wikibase because we intended to create linked data from our archival research, we wanted that linked data to be biographical in focus, and as Wikibase is the infrastructure that underpins Wikidata it seemed the obvious platform to choose.
Describe the criteria that influenced your decision to use Wikibase.cloud or Wikibase suite (the dockers images or manual install).
We chose Wikibase.cloud. Or at least we chose WbStack and then migrated to Wikibase.cloud. The reason was that implementing Wikibase on our own server – including the query service – was beyond my technical abilities to maintain (and manage in terms of server load), and the implementation path for WbStack/Wikibase.cloud convinced me that it would be a robust infrastructure that we can trust.
Did Wikibase meet your needs? Describe the challenges and successes you faced when implementing Wikibase.
Broadly, yes – it is stable, maintained, and has fostered a supportive community. The backlog of feature implementations is notable (e.g. we’d have liked to use Cradle for data entry, but that is not a development priority, which I understand) but we’ve been able to work around it: for example, I’d like to have an easily way to export data for preservation in, say, json format (because I will assume the wikibase will go down in time) but I’ve managed a workaround with web archiving tools like Webrecorder’s Browsertrix Crawler https://github.com/webrecorder/browsertrix-crawler