Royal Library of the Netherlands (Koninklijke Bibliotheek)

For the last ten years, the Royal Library of the Netherlands (KB) has been using Wikimedia infrastructure (Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons and Wikidata) to make its collections more visible, findable and reusable. To stay up to date with new developments in the Wikimedia ecosystem, we needed to acquire both theoretical and practical knowledge about Wikibase. For this we created the KB Wikibase sandbox, a somewhat messy and informal environment to discover the functionalities, possibilities and limitations of Wikibase. It is a relatively low-barrier tool for playing, experimenting, learning, skill-building and knowledge sharing about Wikibase-powered linked open data, both for KB staff, the national and international Wikibase communities, GLAMs and KB network partners. It does not contain any of the KB’s official data or datasets.

Many of the steps we needed to take while setting up our new Wikibase.cloud instance were to be expected when working with fresh MediaWiki instances in general, and Wikibase in particular. However, we found that some steps weren’t immediately logical, manifest or clearly documented, or they were simply beyond our knowledge and experience at the time. We documented our findings in a presentation in which we shared experiences and first impressions of unboxing, configuring and tweaking our Wikibase. We also present solutions for most of the issues we encountered. We included a text version on the wiki itself and on Zenodo for dissemination among the wider GLAM and scientific communities.

The KB is currently rebuilding its linked open data service, for which we have set up institutional Dockerized Wikibase Suite instances, hosted on the IT infrastructure of the KB. For this project our library needed to obtain and implement a lot of new Wikibase specific theoretical and practical expertise. Part of the knowledge and skills we required could be readily harvested from the experiments we documented for our Wikibase.cloud sandbox environment.  Obviously, other parts, such as knowledge about specific MediaWiki extensions not included in the Wikibase.cloud product, could not be drawn from our sandbox know-how and had to be obtained from other documentation channels. And as we are running Wikibase Suite, installing these extensions was a straightforward process.  We continue to explore Wikibase as a backend for our institutional linked open data services and plan to share our knowledge and experiences of this project in the near future.