PROJECT SPECIFICS
The International (Digital) Dura-Europos Archive (IDEA) is a major Digital Humanities initiative funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities (2022-5), the OSUN/Tailloires Network (2024), and the American Council of Learned Societies (2025-7). Our goal is to digitally re-integrate dispersed collections and discipline-specific knowledge related to the important cultural heritage site of Dura-Europos (Syria), and use the fruits of this interdisciplinary work to both bridge accessibility gaps and knowledge silos descendant of early collecting and excavation practices, and diversify the range of professionals thinking with, critiquing, and refining emerging internationally-adopted digital standards and methods. The project’s re-assembly and re-contextualization efforts are driven by Linked Open Data (LOD) methods and critical archival studies. Central to IDEA’s approach is an exploration of how new technologies can be put to use for ethical collaborative interventions related to legacy archeological archives. Our work advances a practical conversation about how to make most ethical use of technology to enhance multi-disciplinary and cross-cultural data-sharing and reuse for the (global) public good.
Key questions guiding our work:
- How can institutions, scholars, curators, and students who have benefited from access to the byproducts of early excavations of interdisciplinary significance work more effectively together towards the goals above?
- Can digital humanities methodologies underpin more equitable intellectual exchange, and even help disrupt entrenched hierarchies of knowledge that frequently still exclude local stakeholders?
- How can emerging technologies help us collaborate with globally-sitatued colleagues across borders in times of conflict and crisis?
The IDEA team’s ‘flavor’ of LOD makes creative use of the Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons platforms to create and virtually network records for buildings, artifacts, archival documents, events, people, and bibliography related to the site using structured data. Our approach draws on Wikidata’s inherent multilingualism and the strengths of the LOD ecosystem to both improve comprehensibility of archaeological knowledge among English-speakers while also mitigating knowledge and access inequities that persist in the wake of foreign-run excavations at the site. Our team is committed to developing workflows and open multilingual datasets that can further enable and prepare the way for collaborative curation with Syrian heritage professionals and communities. We make use of low-technical-barrier, free and open tools, and document and share our processes with the hope that our methods may be a springboard into LOD for low-resourced projects and institutions.
Community Archaeology is a branch of practice that has grown steadily since the 1970s which seeks to diversify the voices involved in the interpretation of the past (Tully 2007, 155). As Atalay (2012, 3) neatly summarized the stakes more than a decade ago: “In many communities where archaeologists work, local residents have limited access to the knowledge and other benefits from the research that is taking place in their own backyards. Clearly, archaeologists must become more involved with and must make their work relevant to wider, nonacademic audiences.”
Since 2022, IDEA has built relationships with Syrian heritage professionals toward the goal of making well-referenced information descendent from a century’s worth of scientific exploration at Dura better accessible to the communities living proximate to the site in the Deir ez-Zor region of Syria. We think of our work as harnessing the power of new technologies to do Community Archaeology at a global scale.
- Archival research
- Archaeological ethnography
- Community-based participatory research (CBPR)
- Linked Open Data (LOD)
See the KEY CONCEPTS AND DEFINITIONS panel for more detail on LOD.
The pioneering ‘flavor’ of LOD our team is developing uses the Wikidata platform, together with geospatial and multimedia content stored in Wikimedia Commons to co-construct bridges among ‘islands’ of (largely mono-linguistic) FAIR data. Thanks to the ability to piggyback off thousands of existing community-contributed translations mapped to Wikidata’s language-agnostic codes for concepts and metadata fields shared by numerous cultural heritage projects and institutions, structuring relationships among language-agnostic entities related to a specific archaeological site makes it possible to pass monolingual discipline-specific knowledge across language barriers. For instance, structuring relationships between the language agnostic codes associated with the relevant entities within Wikidata makes it possible to communicate simultaneously in multiple languages the information that a specific object, published variously in monolingual, disciplinarily-siloed sources as PAT 1079 Doura 13, SEG 7: 664, and Yale University Art Gallery inv. 1938.5999.3084 and 1929.372 was uncovered in 1928 in connection with the south tower of Dura’s main gate (which itself is known variously as the Palmyrene Gate, Palmyra Gate, or Bab al-Hawa, among other placename variants), and contains Greek and Palmyrene inscriptions often treated independently of one another despite their juxtaposition on the same object. While structured data has drawn attention for its utility in bridging institutional and disciplinary information silos, its usefulness for improving the accessibility of information across language barriers and according to different epistemic traditions has been under-recognized in the cultural heritage sector.
Unlike other approaches to LOD that require the use of established (Euro-centric) ontologies and curation platforms aimed primarily at English speakers, the Wikimedia environment’s inherently multilingual technical infrastructure, along with existing multilingual support communities and learning resources, provides practical utility not only for connecting with co-editors from different language traditions but also for actively diversifying the range of professionals contributing to the LOD movement. Wikimedia Commons and Wikidata operate within the same LOD ecosystem as widely-utilized ontologies like CIDOC-CRM and its variants like Linked Art. Mechanisms that support the ‘mapping’ of properties between external ontologies and equivalents in the Wikimedia ecosystem can thus bridge across LOD approaches. Importantly, therefore, datasets curated according to CIDOC variants or using English-language, low-barrier LOD tools whose outputs conform to widely-used linked data standards can be made to interface with datasets curated according to other, less-prescribed LOD methods that hold space for more epistemic flexibility generated in a bottom-up capacity. The Wikimedia environment offers epistemic flexibility along with free data hosting that is not dependent on foreign institutional sponsors with a vested interest in the contents of the dataset. This combination is crucial for efforts to democratize authority over knowledge creation and assertion related to Big Dig sites.
In the era of Big Data, Artificial Intelligence, and misinformation, it is more important than ever that students develop skills related to critical information literacy. In brief, critical information literacy asks educators to work with learners to “co-investigate the political, social, and economic dimensions of information, including its creation, access, and use. This approach to information literacy seeks to involve learners in better understanding systems of oppression while also identifying opportunities to take action upon them.” (Fister 2013)
Since each granular fact or interpretation expressed on a Wikidata item should be anchored by a reference to either a print or digital resource, work with Wikidata presents opportunities for developing critical information literacy skills related to both the analog and digital information landscapes. Importantly, it also offers a valuable foothold to prompt reflection on information privilege, and a pathway for participatory action that leverages institutional resources for the (global) public good. Via the IDEA_Lab@EH, students develop traditional research skills, learning to access and aggregate contextually-related but disciplinarily- and institutionally-fragmented information, and express the fruits of their research in public-facing contributions that pass well-referenced information across language and paywall barriers.
Involving a broad community of globally-situated professionals and students in the establishment of a malleable, multilingual dataset as a hub for collaboration and hands-on learning offers the opportunity to raise broader awareness about the received traditions and access inequalities that shape the contemporary mainstream research landscape, while likewise familiarizing a wider circle of current (and future!) practitioners with more flexible possibilities for information management and exchange aided by the affordances of new technologies.
Learn more about the ways the IDEA team is integrating this work into our teaching:
-Undergraduate Students
- Critical information evaluation: Adopt a building/object assignment; Recognize and evaluate interpretive inferences in disciplinary content (How is the date of an artifact or building established? What is the evidence for an iconographic interpretation?)
- Student-led research projects: archival research (Federica); intersection of geospatial tools and architectural history
- Digital Epigraphy
- CompSci: experience programming for applications that facilitate English/Arabic collaboration, and frame knowledge graph data for English/Arabic users
-Graduate Students
- Hands-on skill-building with digital humanities methodologies
- Experience working with material culture
- Helping to disrupt colonial strands in research
- Publication and conference opportunities
- Mentoring and pedagogy development opportunities
-Professional development
- Lives in Ruins: Spring/Summer 2024
- IDEA_Local projects
This aspect of IDEA’s approach responds to the ACLS Commission on Fostering and Sustaining Diverse Digital Scholarship’s recent calls to diversify the range of practitioners working with digital methods by “grow[ing] and nourish[ing] the networks and pipelines that build a field and inspire students” (Summary recommendation 4). We recommend the commission’s final report: “Other Stories to Tell: Recovery Scholarship and the Infrastructure for Digital Humanities”.
Physical Context
When archaeologists refer to “context,” they typically mean the physical, geographical, and social environment in which people created or used an object or space. Most archaeologists emphasize the importance of context for understanding how artifacts were utilized and what ideas, values, and meanings people associated with them.
Objects such as coins, statues, wall paintings, inscriptions, architecture, and papyri serve as primary source materials that provide the evidentiary foundations for various disciplines within the humanities. Today, there is a greater appreciation across these disciplines for how attention to context—specifically, the other artifacts and architectural settings that individual objects were found alongside—enhances our investigation of the past.
When objects are looted, they are removed from their findspots without documentation, severely limiting their ability to reliably inform us about life in antiquity. At Dura, since 2012, ancient building remains have been damaged due to conflict and erosion, stratigraphic layers have been disturbed by excavation pits, and numerous artifacts have been removed without proper documentation of their find spots and assemblage associations.
Digital Context
In an era grappling with realities of digital colonialism and the ubiquity of Artificial Intelligence and misinformation, we believe that ‘digital context’ is vitally important, and warrants more attention in both research and pedagogy.
Aspects of ‘digital context’ the IDEA team is thinking about include:
What is the relationship between physical artifacts/sites/monuments and their (sometimes multiple) digital surrogates that contribute to a digital footprint downstream of Euro-American collecting and excavation practices? How do we know what we know about physical artifacts/sites/monuments, some of which have been studied for generations? Put another way: how do scholars and institutions arrive at key datapoints like date, iconographic interpretation, and the like that populate publications and database records? Downstream of foreign-run excavations, whose perspectives and vantage-points have shaped the ecosystem of resources/literature that populates the online space? What patterns in the landscape of online resources maintain and uncritically re-entrench artificialities imposed by received disciplinary and/or cultural divides? How have these dynamics impacted perceptions of what is knowable and/or worth knowing in connection with blockbuster archaeological sites? How do online resources guide users (or not) to contextually-related online content managed by other institutions/projects and/or in other languages?
If you’re puzzled about the context-related terms provenance and provenience, the concise explanation from the Follow the Pots Project provides a helpful clarification:
“Provenience refers to the archaeological find spot of an object—the actual place where it was discovered. Provenance, on the other hand, encompasses the complete ownership history of an object, including its provenience. These two terms may be used differently depending on geographic location and academic disciplines, and they are sometimes used interchangeably. Art historians typically prefer the term ‘provenance,’ while archaeologists favor ‘provenience.’ Art historians and museums tend to emphasize the significance of provenance, based on a long tradition of collecting art and tracing the life history of a piece from artist to collector over time. For archaeologists, however, provenience is closely linked to the physical location in space and time, as well as the concept of context.”
Following the successful Sasanian siege of 256 CE, Dura’s ancient inhabitants seem to have abandoned the city. Writing approximately a century after the fateful conflict, Roman soldier and historian Ammianus Marcellinus referred to Dura as a “deserted town” in his account of emperor Julian’s eastward marches in the 360s (Amm. Marc. 23.5.8). It is unclear how much of the ruinous city remained visible at that time.
Over time, environmental factors deposited sand and earth across the site, obscuring building features and artifacts left behind. However, the site was not entirely buried. Photographs taken in 1885 by John Henry Haynes demonstrate that prominent features like the city’s main gate were visible as monumental features in the landscape decades before the start of excavations (Cornell University, The J. R. Sitlington Sterrett Collection of Archaeological Photographs, Sterrett_018, Sterrett_042). In fact, it was the standing remains’ prominence that drew the attention of British soldiers as a place of encampment in 1920, an event that would in turn tip off scientific explorations that brought to light many of the buried elements.
Monumental as the remains loomed in the Syrian landscape, the site was never ‘lost’ to the communities who lived in its proximity. While it is true that the site’s specific ancient identity was only worked out once again with clues from excavated objects, myopic fascination with the site’s ancient layers has prioritized only one phase of a 2000-year-long site biography. In fact, these standing ruins accreted layers of more recent history, histories that have been marginalized as exotic details or else ignored altogether (Baird 2020).
Informed by the influential thinking of Arjun Apadurai (1986) on the social lives of things, the IDEA team is interested in the evolving uses and meanings humans invest in objects and built spaces over time. We are committed to working with globally-situated colleagues to explore how to sensitively integrate these sidelined histories.
Certainly. This is a brief and incomplete list of websites:
ATHAR Project
- FAIR
- CARE
- Ethics of Care
- Belmont Report: Ethical Principles and Guidelines for the Protection of Human Subjects of Research
- Watson, B. M., Alexandra Provo, and Kathleen Burlingame. 2023. Ethics in Linked Data Checklist. November. https://zenodo.org/records/10258209.
- SAA Ethics in Archaeology
- AIA Code of Ethics
- AIA Code of Professional Standards
During the devastating conflict in Syria, Dura-Europos, known for its rich archaeological significance, became a target of extensive non-scientific digging. What started as subsistence looting in the face of economic hardship later scaled into systemized extraction under the control of ISIS (Al Azm 2025). The site was also occupied by military units, and targeted with explosives. Since the outbreak of violence in 2011, Dura has become an unfortunate reference point that highlights the uncomfortable legacies of unequal power dynamics in early excavations, as well as the ongoing relationship between politics and cultural heritage.
Analysis of satellite imagery, corroborated by Syrian colleagues assessing the situation on the ground, is revealing the extent of the damage. Satellite images taken after 2011 show numerous crater-like features across the city and in the necropolis area outside its walls: pits resulting from recent digging activities. Today, Dura is known as one of the most intensely looted cultural heritage sites in the world.
In response to these challenges, the Dura-Europos Archaeological Taskforce (DuRAT) was urgently established as the Asaad regime fell. This task force brings together an international team of leading experts committed to ensuring the safety of local people from on-site hazards, mitigating further looting, and documenting the current state of the site to inform future plans. Periodic reports related to site condition and taskforce activities are made available via the DuRAT website.
To coordinate among contributors and promote interoperability with other Linked Open Data datasets, we maintain publicly-viewable data models for classes of content relevant for modeling archaeological/heritage-related data in Wikidata. Links to the models are available from the Wikiproject IDEA page (see the Look Under the Hood tab). We welcome help revising data modeling decisions; feedback can be communicated via the Wikiproject’s Discussion pages.
The short answer is that we work from FAIR data and open access publications. There is plenty of work to be done with collections and resources already in the open information ecosystem!
Blockbuster ‘Big Digs’ of the early 20th century (like Dura-Europos) have filled collections and textbooks in the West, and manifested a burgeoning digital ecosystem of related online resources and digital datasets. While many museums and archives are doing good work to improve the accessibility of their collections by putting them online, many in compliance with FAIR data principles, accessibility gaps and knowledge silos persist that track back to unequal power dynamics and political structures in place at the time of the first excavations. IDEA is leveraging and aggregating existing FAIR datasets to provide a starting point from which to develop a more diverse range of professionals shaping emerging Linked Data and other international digital standards.
KEY CONCEPTS AND DEFINITIONS
The phrase Linked Open Data (LOD) was coined by Tim Berners–Lee in 2006, and the tenants laid out in his original vision still guide the LOD movement today. The very simplified idea of LOD is that structuring digital records according to some shared principles that allow for a lot of flexibility in implementation can ideally allow for data to speak the same computer-based language behind the scenes, no matter what human language is used in cataloging or data-entry. There is no one way to ‘do’ LOD, which is key to its power and flexibility. However, the very flexibility that is its strength can make LOD difficult to grasp in the abstract.
No matter how it is accomplished, it is important to understand that LOD is powered by a sophisticated approach to storing and sharing information, known as ‘structuring’ data. Structured data relies on the idea that facts and interpretations can be boiled down to a molecular level that is expressed as a series of entities (a.k.a. ‘nodes’ or singular concepts) and relationships among them. Relevant ‘entities’ for cultural heritage sites like Dura-Europos include people, places, things, and events. These ‘entities’ have relationships with either values (measurements, coordinates, etc.) or other people, places, things, and events. Structured relationships between ‘entitites’ can be anchored with citations back to the source of the information (whether print or digital). Critically, it is this innovative distillation of facts and interpretations into modular elements strung together that ultimately makes it possible for computers to work across language, structural, and disciplinary divides that have so far limited the reach of information sharing via means of print media and traditional databases. To learn more about IDEA’s use of this mechanism to build more equitable pathways to information discovery, see Chen 2024; Chen et al forthcoming.
To learn more about LOD, we recommend:
- Linked Open Data, what on earth is that?
- Linked Open Data: how does it work?
- Nurmikko-Fuller, Terhi. 2023. Linked Open Data for Digital Humanities. 1st ed. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003197898.
- Watson, B. M., Alexandra Provo, and Kathleen Burlingame, eds. 2023. Ethics in Linked Data. Library Juice Press.
- Watson, B. M., Alexandra Provo, and Kathleen Burlingame. 2023. Ethics in Linked Data Checklist. November. https://zenodo.org/records/10258209.
- ARIADNEplus, Metadata and vocabularies for archaeological datasets
Digital colonialism is difficult to define and confront because it is, by its very nature, amorphous and systemic. A recent cross-disciplinary literature review (Nothias 2025) provides a useful typology that differentiates six facets of critique:
“The critique of digital colonialism takes aim at the social system where a handful of key actors, through digital technologies, operate on a global scale (unequal concentration of power) and extract profits, data, labor and natural resources (extraction); ensure dependency on their products while reproducing, accelerating or even creating new forms of violence, and imposing distinct cultural norms and values (cultural imperialism) – all of it in the name of progress and helping (benevolence).”
The particular shape of digital colonialism–and therefore the path by which to begin addressing it–in any given context only becomes more visible when examined from multiple vantage points across geographies, languages, and institutions. Imagine, by analogy, the scenario of several people attempting to describe a vast landscape while each is limited to viewing it through a small, narrow window. Each observer, though unable to perceive the full extent of the scene, offers a distinct and valuable perspective on its features. Together, their partial views contribute to a richer, more nuanced understanding of the shared terrain. As a mode to begin addressing such a slippery problem, the IDEA team has shown the value of adopting a practice-led research approach.
‘Practice-Led’ and ‘Research-Creation’ approaches have grown steadily in the arts and social sciences since the 1970s, and explore research questions through practice. In this research framework, making and experimentation are a necessary and essential part of the research process (Gray 1996; Gauntlett 2022; Truman 2023). For a multifaceted, socially-entangled problem like the digital colonialism descendant of excavations from the dawn of the discipline of archaeology, it is perhaps worth being explicit that there will be no ‘one-and-done’ digitization solution. This is a problem that will require iteration, critical reflexivity, and negotiation–all accomplished over time through strong global professional networks. As a mode to begin addressing the slippery problem of digital colonialism as connected with archaeological sites with colonially-entangled histories, especially where the intervention must engage with emerging internationally-adopted technical standards that remain unevenly understood among globally-situated professionals and opaque in the abstract, a shared dataset that can be manipulated in multiple languages has value as a concrete reference point and malleable learning tool. Fundamental to IDEA’s approach, therefore, is the shared ‘making’ of a co-curated Linked Open Data (LOD) dataset in a multilingual public resource. The process of consolidating siloed information relevant to a single site offers opportunities to identify microcolonialisms in the broader cultural heritage ecosystem, reflect as a diverse group of practitioners on the mechanisms that perpetuate them, and co-design interventions to address specific biases and gaps encountered, whether at the collection, shared-infrastructure, or disciplinary levels.
Adapted from the work of Latin American intellectual Aníbal Quijano, the theoretical concept of ‘coloniality of knowledge’ gives name to the (sometimes subtle) ways that dominant societies maintain their power in relation to subjected populations by silencing or delegitimizing Indigenous forms of knowledge (Quijano 1999, 139-142). Within the digital realm, the vehicle for the continuation of such delegitimizing or silencing is often metadata shaped according to a limited (disciplinary, cultural, institutional) perspective. It is the metadata asserted in connection with collection objects’ digital surrogates that ultimately drives their searchability, prescribing precisely which keywords and versions of placenames will surface collection items, but also, perhaps unwittingly, authoritatively asserting into a digital footprint what is worth knowing in connection with colonially-entangled places. We use the term “microcolonialism” as a catch-all to describe aspects of the information landscape connected with colonially-entangled collecting and excavation practices, both in print and online, that unwittingly impose the culture, knowledge, and perspective of a dominant group as a universal norm. (Chen et al forthcoming)
Recovery scholarship “brings to light histories and literary, artistic, and cultural traditions that have been ignored, forgotten, or pushed to the margins by established educational and cultural institutions.” We recommend reading “Other Stories to Tell: Recovery Scholarship and the Infrastructure for Digital Humanities,” published by the American Council of Learned Societies, to understand how digital approaches are enabling groundbreaking, ethically guided recovery scholarship across the humanities.
Studies have shown that learning is often most effective when it’s hands-on (Gasper-Hulvat 2017; Reuell 2019; NMSI 2024). A common complaint among those seeking to learn digital methods/tools is that trainings often offer foundational exposure, but without access to a domain-relevant dataset to manipulate as part of the learning process, it can be difficult to advance beyond general conceptual understandings. As a cross-section of data related to various academic disciplines, IDEA’s open, English/Arabic dataset provides a foundational learning resource where interdisciplinary contributions made as byproducts of the learning process build toward bridging accessibility gaps descendant of collecting and excavation practices. IDEA’s dataset provides footholds for digital skill-building related to academic disciplines like Art and Architectural History, Archaeology, Classics, Ancient Languages and Literatures, Religious Studies, and Anthropology; specialty areas including Numismatics, Epigraphy, and Papyrology; and medium-specific areas like sculpture, wall painting, History of Photography, and various aspects of material culture.
Addressing systemic, slippery problems like digital colonialism will take cooperative and reflexive work accomplished through strong networks of global professionals that, at present, have different levels of access to technical support and other resources. In training students and professionals, IDEA’s learning-by-doing approach not only strengthens individual capacities (digital and ethical) but also fosters a multiplier effect, as participants are empowered to serve as mentors to others in their professional networks. In the long term, this model has the potential to diversify and expand participation in the conversations shaping professional practices as well as shift the ‘digital footprint’ for sites like Dura toward more inclusive and locally-grounded perspectives.
This aspect of IDEA’s approach responds to the ACLS Commission on Fostering and Sustaining Diverse Digital Scholarship’s recent calls to diversify the range of practitioners working with digital methods by “grow[ing] and nourish[ing] the networks and pipelines that build a field and inspire students” (Summary recommendation 4). We recommend the commission’s final report: “Other Stories to Tell: Recovery Scholarship and the Infrastructure for Digital Humanities”.
Archaeology has always been a collaborative practice, but credit to the many hands and minds that contribute to the work has not always been a priority. Notably, each individual edit contributed to the open information ecosystem to build out the network of relationships among the people, places, and things related to Dura produces what is known as a nanopublication. Recognized in the sciences for more than a decade (Golden and Shaw 2016), nanopublications credit individuals for granular contributions to open knowledge resources in the digital sphere. Individual contributors’ edits are automatically logged to their Wikimedia user profile, and also credited via a project dashboard that displays the edit profiles attributed to individual affiliated contributors. IDEA’s framework for collaborative digital work contributes to larger conversations in the field about how to more ethically and transparently credit the labor of the many individuals – paid and unpaid, student and professional – that frequently goes into modern archaeological work, whether in the field or in the archives.
Digital archaeology is a branch of practice that investigates how information technology and digital media can be used in the study of the past. This includes tools like 3D models, digital photography, virtual reality, augmented reality, geographic information systems, and knowledge organization systems like knowledge graphs and databases, and can encompass data collection in the field as well as dissemination and outreach strategies (Morgan and Eve 2012). Excavation–once the exclusive mode for examining buried historical remains–is an inherently destructive method. Advances in digital archaeology have been an important means for developing more sustainable and inclusive archaeological practice.
It is a fact of life that humans reinvent and reinterpret spaces over time. At Dura, built structures were reinterpreted by the Durene community in successive ancient phases of the city’s occupation history: houses became shops or places of worship; the Roman military modified existing structures to quarter soldiers and serve garrison needs.
Although the ancient phase of the site is extraordinary and has been the subject of intense study for more than a century, the history of human interaction with the site spans 2000 years. The ruins of Dura became part of the lived environment for the local community at Salhiyeh, who had names and interpretations for the structures they encountered. This process is undocumented, although some names and theories of the last century are recorded. Even when these interpretations differ from those of the excavators, they are important testimonies of local intangible heritage. Multiple, layered meanings accrued over time need not negate the meanings established via excavation and archaeological reasoning rooted in Western epistemic traditions; at many Big Dig sites, we privilege the interpretations of ancient phases arrived at by archaeological investigative means to the exclusion of acknowledgement of the later meanings such sites have equally accrued over time. Informed by the influential thinking of Arjun Apadurai (1986) on the social lives of things, the IDEA team is interested in the evolving uses and meanings humans invest in objects and built spaces over time. We are committed to working with globally-situated colleagues to explore how to sensitively integrate these sidelined histories.
Many Wikidata statements allow multiple, even conflicting, values. Since each value assertion ought to be backed up by a source, Wikidata editors report the claims of the source as opposed to making their own truth statements. Editors can mark which values are preferred and which are problematic, and use qualifiers to explain these rankings in a way that is instantly legible across languages. This allows, for example, for digital records of theories that are influential but nonetheless outdated. Users can also assign multiple aliases to items, allowing terms used by different communities to be equally searchable.