Wikidata, the sister project of Wikipedia, is a structured knowledge base launched in 2012. It was developed with the goal of "serve anyone anywhere in the world” that is made possible through designing it with the feature of plurality which allows multiple statements to coexist. Having the capability to reflect the world knowledge and storing the data which are not globally agreed, Wikidata seems to head for knowledge diversity as its overarching goal. Theoretically, Wikidata should be diverse because of having the ability to store all possible statements related to a topic. Nevertheless, having the capability only doesn’t ensure the diversity of knowledge in Wikidata because Wikidata is a free and collaboratively edited knowledge base and what gets into Wikidata depends on the volunteer community of editors. The more editors with diverse backgrounds, the more diverse topics and statements to expect in Wikidata, while, research shows high volumes of edits coming from bots (automated edits) which are only hundreds in number in comparison to 20K+ human active editors. Having little knowledge of bots and their editing behavior in Wikidata increases the concern of bots impact on diversity in Wikidata. This research aims to shed light on diversity in the Wikidata context and how bots edits could influence Wikidata towards its overarching goal.

An overview of bot requested tasks in Wikidata over time

References

• Farda-Sarbas, M.; Zhu, H.; Nest, M. F.; Müller-Birn, C. (2019): Approving automation: analyzing requests for permissions of bots in wikidata. In: Proceedings of the 15th International Symposium on Open Collaboration,  Sweden, pp. 1-10.
• Farda-Sarbas, M.; Müller-Birn, C. (2019): Wikidata from a Research Perspective--A Systematic Mapping Study of Wikidata. arXiv preprint arXiv:1908.11153.
• Feller, J.; Gamalielsson, J.; Hill, B. M.; Robles, G. (2019): Proceedings of the Doctoral Consortium at the 15th International Symposium on Open Collaboration. In Doctoral Consortium at the 15th International Symposium on Open Collaboration 2019, Skövde, Sweden, August 19, 2019. University of Skövde.