Eboudreau
Joined 8 March 2021
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Hello! This message concerns your recent imports of soldiers' records from the Civil War into Wikidata. As you probably know, the collection of which these form a part has roughly 10 million entries in it. An ingestion of all of these, therefore, is a nearly 10% increase in Wikidata's size with no further benefit to the rest of Wikidata beyond their simply being present. I thus request that you cease your import activities and request further permission at [[Wikidata:Requests for permissions/Bot]] for your imports before continuing further. (If it matters, this request extends to any other accounts from your institution that may have an interest in the addition of these records.) Thank you. [[User:Mahir256|Mahir256]] ([[User talk:Mahir256|<span class="signature-talk">{{int:Talkpagelinktext}}</span>]]) 18:55, 9 August 2021 (UTC)
:{{reply to|Mahir256}}{{reply to|Kaybdc}}Thank you for your message. The U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) is currently working on a project to add approximately 600,000 new items to Wikidata. Each Wikidata item represents a digitized file unit of records from the series [https://catalog.archives.gov/id/300398 Carded Records Showing Military Service of Soldiers Who Fought in Volunteer Organizations During the American Civil War]. The file units (a total of 1.1 million, not 10 million) in this series generally contain military records of individual soldiers. We chose to create Wikidata items for the approximately 300,000 records belonging to the [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Colored_Troops United States Colored Troops], plus 300,000 more belonging to soldiers from Maryland, Tennessee, Arkansas, Delaware, West Virginia, and New Mexico Territory. While we may eventually want to create items for the remaining 400,000 file units in the series, they are not part of our current plan. Each Wikidata item links to the NARA Catalog record where users can view the digitized documents contained in the file.
:Most of the digitized images from this series are already present as individual objects in Wikimedia Commons as the result of a large contribution of NARA’s digital content by the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA), but they lack any contextual metadata. By creating Wikidata items for each file unit and then, in the next phase of the project, connecting those items to the images in Commons, we hope to make them more usable.
:So far we have created over 200,000 new items for this project. We are using the QuickStatements tool to manually upload 1,000 prepared records at a time; we are not utilizing any bots. Our goal is to complete our project by the end of the calendar year. Prior to the start of this project, NARA already had over 400,000 records in Wikidata that represented record groups, collections, series, file units, and items in our holdings, as well as some of the people and organizations who create. This project represents a significant increase in our Wikidata presence, but the records we aim to create do not differ meaningfully from those that already exist.
:Please let me know if you have any additional questions about this project. We intend to create a project page to provide this information to the Wikidata Community. Unless you or others in the Wikidata community express concerns, we plan to resume the upload process on Tuesday, September 7th. --[[User:Eboudreau|Eboudreau]] ([[User talk:Eboudreau|<span class="signature-talk">{{int:Talkpagelinktext}}</span>]]) 11:45, 2 September 2021 (UTC)
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